The two companies driving the modern economy

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the core of most of the electronics we use today are some very tiny, very powerful chips. Semiconductor chips. And they are mighty: they help power our phones, laptops, and cars. They enable advances in healthcare, military systems, transportation, and clean energy. And they're also critical for artificial intelligence, providing the hardware needed to train complex machine learning.

On today's episode, we're bringing you two stories from our daily show The Indicator, diving into the two most important semiconductor chip companies, which have transformed the industry over the past 40 years.

First, we trace NVIDIA's journey from making niche graphics cards for gaming to making the most advanced chips in the world — and briefly becoming the world's biggest company. Next, we see how the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's decision to manufacture chips for its competition instead of itself flipped the entire industry on its head, and moved the vast majority of the world's advanced chip production to Taiwan.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.
0:08.5	With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next. Learn more at concur.com.
0:17.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:21.0	All right, we have a riddle for you. See if you can guess what we're talking about today.
0:29.0	I was born at a Denny's restaurant.
0:31.0	My name is Latin for envy.
0:33.8	I played a lot of video games in my younger years.
0:36.3	Today I'm more into poetry and translation.
0:39.2	I'm 31 years old, and I've been down and out so many times that my unofficial motto is that I'm 30 days
0:46.5	from going out of business. Still don't have it? What if we said for a moment I was the most valuable company on the planet?
0:56.0	Yeah, that's right. The answer is the computer chip designer,
0:59.5	NVIDIA. And NVIDIA's chips are the leading choice for artificial intelligence developers.
1:05.0	In the last couple of years, NVIDIA's sales have shot up like a jet plane.
1:10.0	Its stock price, more like a rocket.
1:12.0	But there are several chip companies out there, like AMD and others.
1:16.5	So why is NVIDIA the one dominating the AI scene?
1:20.3	Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Weylen Wong.
1:25.0	Invidia went from selling niche graphics cards for gaming to becoming one of the biggest companies in the world with help from another
1:35.0	tech giant. Today on the show two stories about innovators who went up against the
1:40.4	status quo and in the process helped transform an industry we've all come to rely on.
1:47.0	Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes
1:55.2	managing your money in different currencies easy. With Wise, you can send and spend money
	...

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