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.

In response, TSMC appears as if it has joined Uncle Sam. Last month President Joe Biden stood in front of the firm’s vast new American fab under construction in Phoenix, Arizona, and celebrated a proposed $40bn investment. Yet look closer and TSMC offers lessons on how to handle the dirty business of geopolitics. Contrary to what some people think, the new cold war is not forcing it to break away from Taiwan, where it has foundry capacity for making more than three-quarters of the world’s high-end chips. It is unlikely to jeopardise its profitability, which generates the cashflows necessary to retain its edge. Yet it is thinking about a