The Scoop
TSMC, the Taiwanese chips giant of key strategic importance to the US, has big business before the White House, from CHIPS Act funding to discussions of a potential tie-up with Intel. To navigate Washington, the $1 trillion company has sought advice from an unlikely place: middle market investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
Bankers at the firm run for decades by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — and, until this week, majority-owned by him, too— have been providing informal advice to government-affairs executives at TSMC, according to people familiar with the matter, which is not historically a client of Cantor Fitzgerald, whose bread-and-butter business is securities brokerage and smaller IPOs.
It’s typical for companies to seek insight from those connected to a new US administration, and the business and finance backgrounds of Trump officials provide multiple inroads that weren’t available in the Biden White House, which was largely devoid of private-sector resumes.
“While we do not comment on clients or potential clients, the statements regarding Cantor Fitzgerald are baseless and false,” a spokesperson for the firm said. A spokesperson for TSMC declined to comment.
TSMC’s senior leadership separately met with Lutnick in his Midtown offices earlier this year — a meeting requested by Lutnick as he prepared to become Commerce Secretary. He had by then stepped away from day-to-day management of Cantor, installing his two sons in nominal control of the firm. But he did not sell his controlling stake in the firm until this week, a level of private-sector entanglement unusual for Cabinet members.
“Secretary Lutnick has been focused on delivering President Trump’s directive to reshore manufacturing back to the United States,” a Commerce spokesperson said. “The administration’s close collaboration with industry leaders has already secured trillions in investment commitments to Make in America, including a $165 billion investment from TSMC.”
TSMC isn’t paying Cantor for its advice, one of the people said, but its in-house lobbyists have turned to its bankers to understand Lutnick’s thinking. And Cantor bankers have referenced a relationship with TSMC, whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, in new business pitches, according to one of the bank’s clients.
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Lutnick was Cantor’s CEO from 1991 until joining the Trump administration to run the Commerce Department, a consolation prize — he had wanted Treasury — but one that, thanks to his ubiquity around the president and the tariff agenda, has made him a powerful economic voice.
Whether that ultimately turns into new business for Cantor is unclear, but its role as a sounding board for TSMC — which makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and is becoming strategically important as a counterweight to China’s tech sector — suggests an opportunity.
Executives at Cantor have telegraphed high expectations for two of Trump’s signature areas: tech and crypto dealmaking.
The firm is ranked 10th on Dealogic’s US equity capital markets league tables for this year, up from 16th at the same point in 2024. That includes a $500 million at-the-market offering for Rocketlab, a space company, and a $21 billion offering for Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin vehicle Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy.)