Tainan
Taiwan's oldest city hosts TSMC's flagship fabs producing 90%+ of the world's most advanced chips — from sugar cane to silicon in one generation.
The fields where Tainan farmers grew sugar cane and rice now produce over 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors. Tainan is Taiwan's oldest city — founded as a Dutch trading post in 1624, capital of the island for over two centuries — with a population of roughly 1.86 million. Wikipedia leads with temples, night markets, and colonial history. What it undersells is that the Southern Taiwan Science Park, built on Tainan's former agricultural flatland, has become one of the most strategically valuable patches of real estate on Earth.
TSMC outgrew its original home in Hsinchu Science Park in the late 1990s and chose Tainan for expansion — attracted by open land, proximity to National Cheng Kung University's engineering programme, and the city's lower cost structure. Fab 14 began volume production in 2004. Fab 18, TSMC's flagship 5-nanometre gigafab, followed. Together with ASML's EUV training centre and UMC's Fab 12A, the park now employs over 14,000 TSMC workers alone. Nvidia's reticle-size GPU wafers — 800 square millimetres of silicon powering the AI revolution — are fabricated in Tainan.
The concentration is existential in scale. TSMC controls 68% of global pure-play foundry revenue. Taiwan produces 60% of all semiconductors and over 90% of the most advanced chips. Semiconductor manufacturing contributes 25% of Taiwan's GDP. TSMC alone consumes 8% of the island's electricity. Every AI training cluster, every smartphone, every autonomous vehicle depends on wafers that pass through a handful of fabs in Tainan and Hsinchu. The company is building 24 new factories globally — in Arizona, Japan, Germany — partly to reduce this geographic concentration, but Tainan remains the centre of gravity.
The biological parallel is metamorphosis. A caterpillar dissolves its own body inside a chrysalis and reorganises the same cellular material into a fundamentally different organism. Tainan underwent the economic equivalent: sugar cane fields liquefied into semiconductor fabs, agricultural workers' children became process engineers, and a 400-year-old colonial trading post metamorphosed into the manufacturing node that the entire digital economy depends on. The transformation is complete. There is no going back to sugar cane.