---
title: "Chip foundries · advanced-node share and who fabricates AI silicon · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/hardware/foundries/
description: "Who can actually fabricate the leading-edge chips AI agents run on, ranked by advanced-node capacity share. TSMC owns the frontier. A source-graded field book to the deepest bottleneck under the agent stack."
section: "Compute · Foundries"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Advanced-node share

**TSMC · ~90% advanced fab · Samsung Foundry · ~12% adv. node · GlobalFoundries · 14nm, fabs Groq LPU · SMIC · 7nm (N+1), China frontier fab · Intel Foundry · Intel 18A (RibbonFET + PowerVia)**

Who can actually fabricate the leading-edge chips agents run on. TSMC owns the frontier.

## Foundries & lithography in the network · in the supply-chain network

## Common questions

### What is a chip foundry?

A foundry is a factory that manufactures chips to another company's design. It sells manufacturing, not products of its own. TSMC, Samsung and Intel are the firms operating at the leading edge.

### Who makes Nvidia's chips?

TSMC, in Taiwan. Nvidia is fabless: it designs the accelerator and hands the design to a foundry to fabricate. The same is true of AMD and most other AI chip designers.

### What does 3nm or 5nm actually mean?

They are names for a manufacturing generation, not a physical measurement any more. A lower number means a newer, denser and more power-efficient process. Leading-edge AI chips are made on the newest node available, which is why access to it is so contested.

### Why does TSMC dominate chip manufacturing?

Each new node costs tens of billions and years of development, and it needs EUV lithography machines that only ASML makes. Very few firms can sustain that spend, so leading-edge capacity has concentrated in one company with the others running a generation or two behind.

## Next in the learning path

- [Chips The accelerators these foundries print](https://agentfieldbook.org/hardware/chips/)

- [HBM The other scarce input stacked onto the chip](https://agentfieldbook.org/hardware/hbm/)

- [Power The energy ceiling above the fab](https://agentfieldbook.org/hardware/power/)

- [Cloud & Infra Where the fabricated silicon ends up running](https://agentfieldbook.org/hardware/cloud_infra/)

- [Inference The throughput the finished chip delivers](https://agentfieldbook.org/hardware/inference/)

## Data

- [foundries.json](https://agentfieldbook.org/data/foundries.json)

Licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).