C.C. Wei

C.C. Wei (Che-Chia Wei) is chairman and chief executive officer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's dominant contract chipmaker and, by extension, one of the most consequential single points of control in the global data economy. Born in 1953, Wei earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan before completing a PhD in electrical engineering at Yale University in 1985.

After his doctorate, Wei worked as an R&D engineer at Texas Instruments before moving through senior technical and management roles at STMicroelectronics and Charter Semiconductor Manufacturing, building a career-long specialism in advanced process technology. He joined TSMC in February 1998 as a vice president and rose steadily through the company's engineering and operations leadership over the following two decades.

Wei became TSMC's chief executive officer in 2018 and added the chairmanship in June 2024, succeeding Mark Liu, consolidating leadership of a company that manufactures the overwhelming majority of the world's most advanced logic chips, including the processors and AI accelerators built by Nvidia, Apple, AMD and other major technology firms. Under his leadership, TSMC has pushed forward its 3-nanometre and 2-nanometre process nodes and expanded fabrication capacity in Taiwan, the United States, Japan and Europe.

Because virtually every large-scale AI training run and every major cloud data centre depends on silicon that passes through TSMC's fabs, Wei's operational and strategic decisions, on capacity allocation, pricing, geographic expansion and technology roadmaps, ripple directly through the world's capacity to collect, process and act on data. His navigation of geopolitical pressure over semiconductor supply chains, including expanded US manufacturing commitments, has made him a central figure in discussions of technological sovereignty.

Wei was named among Time's 100 most influential people in both its general and AI-specific lists, recognition of the outsized structural power TSMC wields over the hardware substrate of the modern data and AI economy. Few executives anywhere have as much leverage over the physical infrastructure that makes today's data-intensive computing possible.