Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway took a stake of about $US5 billion in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, disclosing its holding in the world’s leading chipmaker as part of its portfolio changes in the last quarter.
TSMC, which has taken over from Intel as the firm advancing the cutting edge of chipmaking, has also emerged as a strategically vital player at a time when the US and China haveTaiwan’s most valuable company has the manufacturing prowess to make the world’s most advanced chips, instrumental to advancing every nation’s future commercial industries like EVs and AI but also feeding their military and cyber defence ambitions.
Chipmaking is one segment that promises sustained growth over the coming years as it’s essential to the expansion of nascent industries like self-driving and electric cars, artificial intelligence and connected home applications. Expansion of cloud services like Amazon.com’s AWS also promises to bring in more orders for silicon that goes into vast data centres.