Geography

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM 1.50%), also known as TSMC, is one of the premier manufacturers of advanced processors, many of which are used for artificial intelligence. The company’s strong position in this space and its growth over the past few years have resulted in its stock price soaring nearly 200% over the past three years.

Recent research from The Motley Fool sheds some light on how TSMC’s manufacturing technology is a step ahead, how it makes the majority of its revenue, and where most of its customers are located. Importantly, all of these factors work together to set TSMC apart from the competition and make its stock a smart one to own for years to come.

1. The company is a leader in advanced chip manufacturing

TSMC manufactures some of the world’s most advanced processors, and the breakdown of the company’s revenue shows just how much comes from its different manufacturing capabilities. Chip companies use the term chip node to describe how many transistors will fit onto a semiconductor, with the unit of chip measurement being nanometers (nm). Generally speaking, the smaller, the more advanced the processor.

Here’s a snapshot of Taiwan Semiconductor’s top five revenue generators, by chip size:

Data source: Taiwan Semiconductor.

This revenue composition is important to highlight because it shows that a whopping 60% of the company’s semiconductor sales are from the smallest and most advanced processors (3nm and 5nm) on the market.

No other company compares to TSMC’s manufacturing prowess, and it’s likely to continue outpacing the competition. TSMC has already sign 15 deals with tech companies for 2nm semiconductor manufacturing, leaving rivals, including Samsung, far behind.

2. Its advanced processors are driving its growth

Just as important as the technology behind TSMC’s revenue is what technologies those processors power. If we go back five years, smartphones were the driving revenue force for TSMC. Now, it’s high-performance computing (think AI data centers).

The company has dominated the manufacturing of advanced processors so well, in fact, that TSMC makes an estimated 90% of the world’s most advanced processors.

Here is the company’s revenue distribution over the past four quarters:

Data source: Taiwan Semiconductor.

TSMC’s making the majority of its revenue from high-performance computing is important because it shows that the company successfully adapted with the times, moving from its previously dominant smartphone segment to sales from chips to AI data centers.

More growth could be on the way, too, considering that semiconductor leader Nvidia believes technology companies could spend up to $4 trillion on AI data center infrastructure over the next five years.

3. U.S. tech giants drive demand

Taiwan Semiconductor is based in, you guessed it, Taiwan, but the vast majority of its sales come from selling processors to North American companies. About five years ago, North America accounted for just over half of TSMC’s sales, but that’s jumped to 75% currently. China and the Asia-Pacific region tie for second place with just 9% each.

Why does this matter? Some of the most advanced artificial intelligence companies, including Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet, are based in North America. Taiwan Semiconductor’s shift toward sales in this geographic area is a reflection of the company successfully attracting the world’s leading AI companies to have their chips made by TSMC.

Is Taiwan Semiconductor a buy?

With TSMC making an estimated 90% of the world’s most advanced processors, the company outpacing its manufacturing competition, and artificial intelligence companies poised to spend trillions of dollars to build out and upgrade data centers, TSMC is well positioned to be a great AI stock for years to come.

Just keep in mind that the stellar gains TSMC stock has experienced over the past several years have been a result of the early AI boom, which means future returns may not be quite as impressive.

Is there a better inkblot test for America right now than reaction to Bad Bunny being the halftime act for Super Bowl LX?

Soon after his name was announced, social media exploded into meritocracy debates as if the National Football League’s decisions are culturally motivated and not commercially. Taylor Swift is the most streamed artist in Spotify history. Bad Bunny is No. 2. For a domestic sports league trying to grow its popularity globally, the rationale seems clear.

And yet because he is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, conservative talking heads must project outrage and offer listeners nonsensical objections.

“It’s so shameful they’ve decided to pick somebody who seems to hate America so much to represent them at the halftime show,” Corey Lewandowski, a longtime confidant of President Trump who currently advises the Department of Homeland Security, told conservative podcast host Benny Johnson. “We should be trying to be inclusive, not exclusive. There are plenty of great bands and entertainment people who could be playing at that show that would be bringing people together and not separating them.”

Suggesting Bad Bunny hates America is an interesting take given Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917. The three-time Grammy winner also has four No. 1 albums on the very American Billboard pop charts and has already performed during halftime at the Super Bowl back in 2020 with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. The Federal Communications Commission received more than 1,300 complaints about the show that year with the vast majority being from parents complaining about the stripper pole and twerking of the women, not Bad Bunny’s alleged hate of America.

I don’t know if Lewandowski and Johnson knew any of that before they started talking, but I get the feeling it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Once Lewandowski suggested ICE was going to be at the Super Bowl — an event that had an average resale ticket price of $8,600 in 2024 — it was clear their conversation wasn’t about solving the immigration problem.

It was clear they didn’t know much about the history of halftime acts either.

In 2006, a Super Bowl held in the heart of Detroit — the birthplace of Motown — rolled out the Rolling Stones, who are from London. In 2010, a Super Bowl in Miami — home of salsa and Afro-Cuban jazz — gave us the Who … who are also from England. In 2002, months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U2 — a band from Dublin, Ireland — did the show. There is a decades-long precedent for non-Americans to headline the Super Bowl. Though, again, quick geography lesson: Puerto Rico is part of the United States and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

Detractors like Lewandowski and Johnson want to make English being Bad Bunny’s second language an indictment of his patriotism, as if growing up speaking English is a criterion for citizenship. It isn’t and never has been. Perhaps instead of using their platform to stir fear at a time when calm is needed, the two could see next February’s show as an opportunity to grow. Because honestly, it is so counterproductive to allow influential voices to gaslight the country into forgetting the milestones it’s already crossed. “La Bamba” by Los Lobos was sung in Spanish and hit No. 1 nearly 40 years ago. The only English in the K-pop hit “Gangnam Style” is “hey, sexy lady,” and that song made PSY an international sensation.

Instead of making people fear Spanish at the Super Bowl, maybe encourage them to spend this NFL season learning something beyond “gracias.“ Because in this world, there are people who choose to speak in English and there are people who have no other choice. Only one of those scenarios feels like freedom to me.

That was the topic of discussion in the summer of 2008 after then-Sen. Barack Obama said this at a campaign stop in Georgia: “Understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual.”

At the time many conservatives — such as Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs — used those comments not as a prompt to debate the merits of Obama’s remarks regarding U.S. education but as a weapon to attack him. They accused him of being divisive — when years ago Nelson Mandela said when you talk to someone “in his own language, that goes to his heart.” In fact, Dobbs said “instead of diversity, he’s talking about factionalism.” Nonsense that sounds a lot like the echoes we hear from Lewandowski and Johnson today.

It’s not just a question of if our children should be bilingual; it’s also about being curious about the world we live in. This NFL season has already featured games in Ireland and Brazil. Mexico City is an annual event. The league is in it for the bag. And eventually there will be a team based overseas where Spanish is heard, visiting teams carry passports and Bad Bunny is no stranger.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

It’s easy to forget sometimes that, alongside everything else that’s crowding your news brain right now, deforestation in the Amazon is still a massive crisis for the planet, one that is fast reaching a point of no return regarding our ability to curtail its terrible impact.

Movies love superheroes that take on their villains with big-stage swagger. But documentaries thrive on underdogs and when it comes to standing up to the illegal logging and mining that’s flattening South America’s leafy canopy, Indigenous people have more than shown their mettle against buzzing chainsaws or buzzy politicians. The energetic dispatch “We Are Guardians” from directors Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman, is the latest advocacy feature to bring cameras into the Amazon to juxtapose beauty and devastation — as well as a David vs. Goliath battle as it’s experienced on the ground.

We meet soft-spoken family man Marҫal, from the Indigenous territory of Arariboia, whose decades-old group of organized, unpaid, weapons-trained and face-painted “forest guardians” take the fight directly to loggers, wherever they can sneak up on them, at great risk to their lives. (Their foes are armed too.) Though Marçal speaks eloquently of his holistic view of their mission — he’s protecting the water, the trees and the region’s wildlife — he also shows concern that the Amazon’s uncontacted peoples stay free of interference too.

Meanwhile, activist Puyr Tembé from the Alto Rio Guama territory is working hard to get more Indigenous women into politics and in seats of power — a tall order at a time (filming mostly took place between 2019 and 2022) when rapaciously pro-agribusiness Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro openly treated the rights of Indigenous peoples as dismissable and a nuisance. As Tembé articulates, it takes a reforesting of the mind and heart to catalyze progress.

These dedicated warriors certainly earn our admiration in the good/evil binary of the conflict, but complications help give the documentary shape, as in the attention given a crusty logger named Valdir, who agreed to be featured on camera. A logger for over 50 years since he was 8, he knows exactly what’s wrong with his job, but is trapped in the maw of an industry as a means of survival for his family. Even a wealthy landowner can come off like a victim here, as is the case with Tadeu, a businessman who in the 1990s started an ecological sanctuary on his 28,000 hectares, and whose complaints to the Brazilian government about illegal encroachment on his land fall on deaf ears.

There’s a comprehensiveness to how “We Are Guardians” lays out a big, knotty problem of environment, politics, geography and business — internationalized yet hyper-local — while spotlighting the Indigenous push-back efforts. But the movie’s verité style of thumbnail portraiture doesn’t always dovetail neatly with the other elements: the unloading of facts, getting those drone shots in and projecting a thriller-like atmosphere. Coming on the heels of the aesthetically sharp and immersive “The Territory” from a couple years ago (which covers some of the same ground), “We Are Guardians” feels more like a highlighting of issues than a documentary journey that takes you somewhere.

But sometimes, it’s whatever gets out the message, right? When it comes to climate change, our media diet is starved. So if you need that refresher course in the importance of saving the Amazon, “We Are Guardians,” like a well-made pamphlet, does the job with plenty of efficiency and heat.