The two companies driving the modern economy

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.

This episode was hosted by Darian Woods, Wailin Wong, and Adrian Ma. The Indicator episodes were originally produced by Julia Ritchey and Viet Le, with help from Nicky Ouellet and Willa Rubin. They were edited by Kate Concannon, and engineered by Cena Loffredo, James Willetts and Neal Rauch. The original episodes were fact-checked by Taylor Washington and Sierra Juarez, and the Planet Money edition was fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episode about NVIDIA by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

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