Dr. Morris Chang
speaker
200 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Morris Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah. It started, my relationship with Jensen, started with a letter that he sent to me I think it was 1997, and the letter was sent through the post office, and I received it in Hsinchu. And the letter said that they were NVIDIA, the company that Jensen was the CEO of, was a small company, but they had developed some technology
really promising chips, but they were looking for a foundry, and they had approached TSMC's San Jose office, but they really got no answer from the San Jose office. would I please contact Jensen because NVIDIA really wanted to do business with PSMC. So I was going to the U.S. in the next week anyway. So the letter, frankly, raised my curiosity and also my
irritated me a little bit because I had always told our salespeople that we should never be negligent in talking to future customers, even if the customer seems to be a very small one.
Yeah. and they had maybe 50 or 60 employees. So TSMC, I think, at that time already had a few thousand employees. We had exceeded, I remember we had exceeded $1 billion in revenue in 1995, and this was 1997. So we were, relatively speaking, we were a pretty big company here.
Yeah, right. So the following week, I went to California. And I called him back without advance notice. I called Jensen. I looked up. I think there was a telephone number on the stationery that he sent me the letter on. Jensen himself picked up the phone, and there was a lot of background noise. He was arguing something with his people.
But as soon as I introduced myself, I said, this is Morris Stern. He immediately shouted to those people that were making noises. He said, quiet! Morris Chang is calling me. So I then proceeded to make an appointment with him to visit him, to visit NVIDIA the next day or something like that. And that was our first meeting.
visit the first meeting and he immediately impressed me with his articulateness and also impressed me with his optimism. Well, he was also very frank. He told me that Nvidia was in financial difficulties, but the chip that he wanted now to have foundried would not only... save the company, it will also make NVIDIA a major customer of TSMC. I mean, that was actually quite a bold statement.
We're over a billion dollars now. To be a major customer of ours, he would have to produce revenue for us of at least $50 million a year, okay?
I forgot the number, but it was a very successful chip. I don't think it was Riva or anything. It was a games chip, of course. It was successful. In fact, his prediction came true. Not only did it solve Nvidia's financial problems, it helped. prevented from being bankrupt, you know. Not only did they do that, it also started to make them a major customer of TSMC.
Within two or three years, they were, they did become one of the biggest five customers of TSMC. Yeah, very successful chip, yeah.
Well, I decided to... give the CEO job to a potential successor of mine while I will still retain the chairmanship. In Taiwan, usually the chairman is the top man anyway, even though CEO is another person. So the problem you just mentioned happened during the period when someone else was the CEO. Apparently, it was a manufacturing problem. It was also a quality problem.
And it was the quality problem that the CEO first reported to me. But the CEO insisted that our people... We had the Director of Quality insist that we were not, TSMC was not at fault. And so on that basis, on the basis of our quality manager's arguments, he had not offered NVIDIA anything.
Now, as far as the manufacturing problem was concerned, it was a U problem, and everybody was suffering from it. And of course, NVIDIA at that time was perhaps the biggest customer of that node, the 40 nanometer node.
But the problem apparently just continued. And I was, even though I was not the CEO of I was getting a little impatient. And then, of course, some other problems popped up. Other problems than this 40 nanometer NVIDIA problem. So I decided to take the CO position back. So in 2009, I did that. And there were several problems. priority problems that I had to deal with when I took the CEO job back.
And one of them was this continuing problem, continuing argument, controversy with NVIDIA. Anyway, I remember in the first few days after I took back the CEO's ship, I called all the major customers, including Jensen.
Oh, yeah. Qualcomm was also, yeah. And Qualcomm, the top customers didn't change very much since then, except for maybe one. Apple. Apple, yeah. Apple came later, yeah. And in my call with Jensen, he was still very friendly with me. But he also reminded me in a very serious tone that we had the quality delivery manufacturing problem on the 40 nanometer.
All right, so I said I knew that, and it's one of my priority problems. Give me a couple weeks, and I will get back with you. And as I said, I did have several problems aside from the 40-nanometer problem. manufacturing problem and the problem with the argument that we were having with Nvidia. Aside from that, we also had the problem of the pricing. It was dropping faster than the cost.
I mean, you don't want to see that. The gross margin percentage kept dropping.
All right, so that was one problem. Another problem was the immediate one that triggered me to retake the CEO-ship because the previous CEO had laid off, except he didn't use the term lay off, you know. He used the bad performance review, the worst performance review people, and there were about 600 or 700 of them. And he laid them off on the basis of their poor performance review.
Well, we never did that, you know. I mean, the worst we would do was to put them on, place them on probation for six months. And quite often, you know, at the end of the six months, everybody would go back to his or her old job. And some of them would get... transferred because they were in the wrong jobs, you know. So some of them would get transferred.
Showing 1–20 of 200 · page 1 of 10
Next →