The little-known company behind TSMC’s most advanced semiconductors

The world’s most advanced and delicately fine-tuned semiconductors wouldn’t be possible without the aid of giant steel storage tanks built by a little-known Tokyo company founded in 1927.

Valqua Ltd. makes specialised, super clean containers for storing essential chipmaking chemicals, and it expects to hit its highest sales ever this fiscal year. It’s by far the world’s largest supplier of such tanks, dwarfing a clutch of smaller competitors in places like Taiwan, and providing almost every tank used by the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to Ichiyoshi Research Institute analyst Mitsuhiro Osawa.