Listen up, everyone. I don’t want to interrupt your little Micron or Samsung rally. But if you think SaaS companies are dead, let me tell you: semiconductor companies are currently digging their own graves. Look at chip design companies like Texas Instruments, Infineon, NXP, Microchip, etc.—they’re generating high revenue right now thanks to their data center business. They design chips, manufacture them or have them manufactured, and then sell them.
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But who’s behind the creation of nearly every chip produced by all those companies? Cadence and Synopsys.
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They provide the chip design software, work closely with foundries, gain early access to new manufacturing processes, and learn from hundreds of chip projects across the industry. They’ve spent decades turning chip-design expertise into software, and now they’re embedding AI into the process.
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Today:
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EDA tools → Chip Designer → TSMC
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Tomorrow:
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EDA + AI → TSMC
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Will that middle layer remain just as valuable once AI can handle more of the design work??
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The market still treats Cadence and Synopsys as “tool vendors.” But could the tool eventually become the platform?!? And once the platform knows enough, it starts doing work that its customers used to do. Isn’t that why ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, and all the others are f....???
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Tldr: TSMC long