Who Really Makes the Chips? The Hidden Geography of Revenue, Manufacturing—and Tariffs
The semiconductor industry is more fragmented than it looks. U.S.-based firms dominate headlines with their 50.4% global market share, but the factories that make the physical chips are mostly in Asia. Wall Street rewards Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD for their soaring revenue and design IP, yet Taiwan’s TSMC, South Korea’s SK hynix, and Malaysia’s OSAT firms quietly power the machines that turn those designs into silicon. Data for this analysis can be foud in my report at The Information Network entitled “Global Semiconductor Equipment: Markets, Market Shares and Market Forecasts.”
That geographic separation doesn’t just cause confusion over who gets the credit. It creates financial and policy distortions around how revenue is booked, where capital is deployed, and how tariffs are levied.
Consider modern smartphones. A chip design may originate at Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in Cupertino, California. But the product is fabricated in Taiwan at TSMC. From there, the finished wafers head to Malaysia for back-end packaging. Then they’re sent to China, where final device assembly—including the printed circuit board, camera module, and screen—is done by Foxconn or another engineering, manufacturing and services. This is illustrated in Chart.
Chart 1
When that smartphone is finally shipped back to the United States, tariffs are applied—not at the chip level or PCB level, but on the entire assembled device. This mismatch has three cascading implications:
Revenue misattribution – The chip is designed in the U.S., manufactured in Taiwan, and sold globally. Financially, the sale is often booked by the U.S. headquarters, boosting America's market share even if no chip was physically touched on U.S. soil.
Policy confusion – Trade data from WSTS shows only 29.8% of global chip sales occur in the Americas, contradicting the SIA’s 50.4% HQ-based share. The discrepancy obscures the real dependence on Asian fabs.
Tariff distortion – As shown in the smartphone supply chain diagram, tariffs are applied at the final device level, not at each stage of component origin. This penalizes integration in China more than chip production in Taiwan—even when both are critical to the same device.
Semiconductor Market Share by Headquarters vs. Sales Geography
According to Table 1, U.S.-headquartered semiconductor firms account for over half of global revenue, reflecting their dominance in chip design, systems architecture, and branded platforms. Korea follows with 21.1%, driven largely by memory giants Samsung and SK hynix. But what’s critical here is that this chart tracks the location of company headquarters, not the location of fabs, tooling, or capital spending. It is a map of where value accrues on paper, not where silicon gets produced.
According to Table 2, the dataset provides a different lens—semiconductor revenue by