TSMC announced on November 10board of directors, approved the subscription of OpenAI special shares and Anthropic’s new IPO shares at a scale of no more than US$500 million each (total upper limit of US$1 billion). Behind this huge investment totaling more than NT$32.5 billion, the driving force behind the actual investment and shareholding responsibility is TSMC Partners, an overseas investment subsidiary established by TSMC for nearly 30 years.
TSMC Partners’ Structure and Positioning
TSMC Partners, Ltd., founded in 1998, is a 100% wholly-owned overseas investment subsidiary of TSMC and registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI).
In TSMC's huge global organizational chart, TSMC Partners is not positioned as a general financial operating company (TSMC Global is mostly responsible for financial debt issuance), but a holding platform focusing on "mature assets and partner equity with strategic defensive value."
As of the third quarter of 2026, including this investment in OpenAI and Anthropic, the total securities investments managed by TSMC Partners accounted for only 0.83% of TSMC’s total assets and 0.86% of shareholders’ equity. This means that TSMC leverages less than 1% of its assets to leverage the world's top strategic alliances with almost zero liquidity risk.
TSMC Partners’ past significant investments
Looking back on the history of semiconductor development in the past few decades, every major move made by TSMC Partners has accurately stepped on the key nodes of the paradigm shift of the semiconductor industry:
Investment target Year and scale of sale Strategic value and investment results ASML (ASML) 2012/Investment of approximately 838 million euros and acquisition of approximately 5% equity) At that time, next-generation lithography technology was stalled, and TSMC participated in the ASML customer joint investment plan through TSMC Partners, investing in research and development and binding the first batch of machines. This move not only established TSMC’s absolute leadership in 7nm, 5nm, and 3nm, but also brought back several times astonishing capital gains to TSMC through the subsequent divestment of its holdings in batches. Arm Holdings (ARM) 2023/Investment of approximately US$100 million (IPO investment) As SoftBank promotes Arm's return to Nasdaq listing, TSMC Partners takes a stake as a cornerstone investor to deepen the architectural integration of smartphones, data centers, and subsequent CSP self-developed ASIC chips with TSMC's Open Innovation Platform (OIP).From ASML's device revolution, Arm's architecture monopoly, to today's algorithm competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, TSMC Partners' main investment line has always centered on "the core link of the future of semiconductors."
The strategic puzzle of the new "TSMC Ventures"
However, as advanced processes advance to the angstrom generation (A16, A14), coupled with the explosion of silicon photonics (CPO), chip packaging (chiplet) and heterogeneous integration, innovation no longer only comes from mature giants, but more breakthroughs are sprouting from early-stage laboratories and start-up companies. Faced with such industrial changes, TSMC Partners alone is no longer enough to cover the technological frontier by taking on "large giants".
Therefore, on the same day that it approved the investment in OpenAI and Anthropic, TSMC’s board of directors simultaneously passed a key decision:Approved to establish a new industrial investment company - tentatively named TSMC Ventures - with a capital of no more than US$500 million.
This marks that TSMC’s capital layout has officially evolved into a mature dual-track system:
- TSMC Partners: Continue to serve as the holding vehicle for mature giants, manage strategic holdings of tens of billions of positions such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Arm, and lock in top-level computing power needs.
- TSMC Ventures: Create a professional corporate venture capital (CVC) similar to Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures. It will also take on the LP role of external professional hardware venture capital funds such as Maverick Silicon Fund II (US$5 million) this time.
Through the division of labor between TSMC Partners and TSMC Ventures, this foundry giant is no longer just a manufacturer that passively accepts orders, but is using its powerful capital fleet to fully dominate the rules of the game for future AI and semiconductor evolution.
this article It's behind both OpenAI and Anthropic! Revealing the Secrets of TSMC Investment Company TSMC Partners first appeared in Chain News ABMedia。
