For a company worth $430bn that straddles one of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical flashpoints, there is something endearingly unflustered about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Both America and China covet its unmatched ability to make advanced chips. It’s a far bigger supplier to the former than the latter, but if either superpower, through economic pressure or brute force, fully stifled its independence, the fallout would be immense. Many of its fabrication plants are on the west coast of Taiwan and perilously exposed to a Chinese invasion across the Taiwan Strait. Yet it refuses to be panicked. “If there is a war then, my goodness, we all have a lot more than just chips to worry about,” its 91-year-old founder, Morris Chang, said in a podcast last year. His successor as chairman, Mark Liu, insists that peace is in everyone’s interest.

Such insouciance runs the risk of sounding naive. Like it or not, the big-power rivalry over semiconductors—what some call the Silicon Curtain—has solidified in recent months. China has long sought, to little avail, to build a chip industry from scratch. Last year America strengthened its stranglehold on certain “choke-point” technologies, such as artificial-intelligence chip design, chip software and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, in order to stymie China’s ambitions. Moreover, America’s CHIPS Act, enacted last year, has used subsidies to entice about $200bn in investment commitments. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been Intel, a rival as well as client of TSMC.