It was easily the biggest economic security crisis of the pandemic: the supply chain disruptions that plagued the industrialised world brought into sharp relief how reliant the global economy was on a handful of microchip manufacturers in East Asia.

Surging demand as homebound workers upgraded their electronics and public transport-averse commuters ordered new cars led to shortages and bottlenecks — and triggered hand-wringing in the Pentagon and other national security agencies, whose high-tech weaponry needed chips made close to the shores of the west’s emerging geostrategic rival, China.

No company was more central to those fears than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which not only produces nearly 90 per cent of chips made using the most advanced technologies, but also has most of its production on a home island that has become the target of increasingly belligerent Chinese threats.