I'm not sure they really can do both (because doing the TSMC model well intentionally excludes the other).

Part of TSMC's offer is that they won't do design, they won't compete with you on design etc.

They specialize in the best possible fab and service for your design and that's it.

> Part of TSMC's offer is that they won't do design

That's kind of a hoax. GUC (Global Uni Chip) is huge, and a nearly-wholly-owned subsidiary of TSMC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Unichip_Corporation

TSMC has a large design operation. It simply is part of a subsidiary rather than the parent company, that's all.

There are a lot of shady links between TSMC and GUC. I was once pressured to "collaborate" with GUC as an explicit condition of getting access to the then-bleeding-edge 16nm PDK. I turned it down. A competitor of mine (with whose chief engineer I am friends) had the same screws put to them.

Interesting - thanks, I didn’t know that.

Exactly right.

Someone else mentioned it, but that's really not true about TSMC.

Doesn’t Samsung make a whole bunch of components and use the components to create products laptops tv phones storage

Actually I'd be curious to see how a Korean Chaebol works in this regard. At various points, Apple was competing w/ Samsung (mobile phones) to get fab space on Samsung (chip fab), and I think at various times different parts of Samsung were suing Samsung...

Fly Wheel, a term people used to describe Amazon.

Imagine 100x of that, and that is Samsung.