The crisis that Intel is going through has shaken the foundations of the semiconductor industry. And it is understandable if we keep in mind that it is one of the oldest companies in the sector. The departure of Pat Gelsingerits former general director, on December 2 has made rivers of ink flowbut few voices, no matter how expert, have the authority of Morris Chang, the respected 92-year-old engineer who founded TSMC in 1987.

Of Taiwanese nationality, although born in the current People’s Republic of China and educated in the United States, Chang has publicly demonstrated on several occasions that he knows it all. The company that, despite its advanced age, still represents dominates the chip industry with insulting clarity. Intel and Samsung compete with it, but they do so at a considerable distance. In fact, TSMC triples market share of these two companies in the integrated circuit manufacturing industry.

Morris Chang criticizes Gelsinger’s strategy

For Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Chang is not just a leader in the semiconductor industry. “The world is full of successful people, but heroes are rare. There is a big difference between success and impact. And I think Morris, by his career, his philosophy, TSMC, his strategy and his core values, is, without a doubt, doubt, an example of the industrial revolution”, holds Huang without hiding in the slightest his devotion to the founder of TSMC.

This statement aptly summarizes why Morris Chang has been so respected for more than a decade. And his authority has made his diagnosis of what is happening at Intel worthy of our attention. “I don’t know why Pat resigned (…) I don’t know if his strategy was bad or if he didn’t execute it well. He seemed to want to focus more on become an integrated circuit factory than in designing chips for artificial intelligence (AI). Of course, now it seems like he should have turned to AI.”

This reflection by Morris Chang is aligned with the conclusion they have reached a good part of the experts and analysts of the semiconductor industry, but it has the consistency that only the analysis of someone who knows Pat Gelsinger personally can have. In fact, the former Intel executive traveled to Taiwan just a month before leaving the company he has led for almost four years to negotiate with TSMC executives the production of chips in the latter company’s 2 and 3 nm nodes.

We know that during that trip Gelsinger met with CC Weithe current president and CEO of TSMC, and probably also with other executives of the Taiwanese company. It is possible that Morris Chang was among them, although at the moment it is only a hypothesis. What we know for sure is that he argues that Intel should have poured heart and soul into chip design for AI to compete with NVIDIA head to head.

However, it is not surprising that Chang criticized Gelsinger’s desire to establish itself as a manufacturer of integrated circuits for third parties. After all, that is the part of the semiconductor industry in which TSMC moves like a fish in water and with hardly any competition.