In 2023, Joe Biden met some friends in the desert for a political scene that’s repeated every week, in every country, in offices ranging from the smallest mayoralty to the Presidency of the wealthiest empire in human history: A groundbreaking. A US flag hung from an excavator parked in the orange Arizona dirt, as Biden raised a champagne glass to celebrate the construction of a new fabrication plant from the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC is perhaps the most structurally important firm in the global economy, accounting for about half of global semiconductor production. One of their biggest customers, Apple, joined Biden on stage, in the personage of CEO Tim Cook, who had risen to power as the firm’s supply chain impresario. Apple is the largest phone manufacturer in the world, and occasionally the most valuable company, but it makes no phones: Chips from Taiwan are placed in devices made in China or Malaysia, often by Taiwanese-owned assemblers like Foxconn. TSMC founder Morris Chang was also present. Growing up, his family moved from city to city-fleeing the violence of the Chinese civil war. Educated in the US, Chang worked for American semiconductor pioneers like Sylvana and Texas Instruments, before moving to Taiwan to start his own firm—recruited by a government that, decades earlier had lost that civil war. Chang’s wife, Sophie, volunteered for Biden’s first senatorial campaign in Delaware.
