NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang had a chance to lead TSMC, but he refused. This case became known from a biographical book about the founder of the Taiwanese chipmaker, Morris Chang.
Today, NVIDIA is the most expensive company on the planet in terms of market capitalization and one of the largest companies in the world in terms of sales. However, in 2013, NVIDIA was not yet such a giant, and it was then that Morris Chang, founder of TSMC, asked Jensen Huang whether he is interested in becoming CEO of TSMC. This is stated in Morris Chang’s biography.
After returning to the position of TSMC CEO in 2009 amid global economic changes, increased costs to meet future demand, and the emergence of Apple as TSMC’s main customer, Morris Chang, then 82 years old, began to consider successors. One option was to appoint a successful person from the outside. Jensen Huang seemed like a good candidate: by then, he had built one of the largest companies, controlling 60% of the global graphics card market and expanding into data centers and consumer electronics.
The other option was to promote someone from the company. Chang did not like this very much, given that he had to remove Rick Tsai, who headed TSMC from 2005 to 2009, due to problems with the 40nm process and employee management in the economic crisis.
Jensen Huang was not particularly interested in becoming CEO of TSMC. In 2013, NVIDIA offered its extremely popular Kepler line of graphics cards, promoted the Tegra line, introduced the Shield gaming console, and successfully worked with the data center. As a sign of confidence in the future, Huang announced plans to build a larger NVIDIA headquarters.
As a result, Chang had to opt for Plan B, which involved appointing S.S. Wei and Mark Liu as CEOs and installing a «dual leader» system in 2013. When Morris Chang retired from active work in 2018, Mark Liu became chairman of the board and C.S. Wei became CEO.
At the end of 2023, Mark Liu decided to leave the company (rumored to be due to delays with Fab 21 in Arizona), while Xi Wei combined the positions of chairman and CEO. At TSMC, the chairman is responsible for business relationships and strategic directions, which, in Liu’s case, meant expanding outside Taiwan in response to geopolitical challenges. Today, S.S. Wei is responsible for everything from strategic directions and geopolitical challenges to business relations and day-to-day operations.
Jensen Huang is also the chairman and CEO of NVIDIA. His strategic vision for data centers and artificial intelligence has helped make NVIDIA a top global company.
Source: Tom’s Hardware