Probably all of the above. The founder of TSMC was educated at Harvard/MIT/Stanford, and spent the first 25 years of his career working for Texas Instruments in Silicon Valley. He founded TSMC because the Taiwanese government gave him a large grant to found a nonprofit research institute in Taiwan. He was looking at the competitive landscape and realized that the one way Taiwan could capitalize on its biggest advantage (low labor costs of fairly educated labor, at the time) was to do only manufacturing and outsource the design, IP, and marketing to other countries that were better at it.