Hsinchu (TSMC)
The most strategically important small city on earth.
Kernel
Hsinchu is the city that fabricates roughly 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors. The Hsinchu Science Park (1980) and TSMC (founded 1987, by Morris Chang, with state co-investment) created the foundry-business model — TSMC manufactures, fabless companies (NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm) design. By 2025 a single firm in a single city makes the silicon every AI model trains on. The asymmetry between Hsinchu's population (~450,000) and its civilizational importance is unprecedented in the history of cities.
Why it matters strategically
ASML (Veldhoven, Netherlands) ships the EUV machines. TSMC (Hsinchu) operates them at scale. NVIDIA (Santa Clara) buys the output. The compute-supply chain that powers every frontier AI lab runs through three places on earth, and Hsinchu is the most exposed of the three. The 2022 Pelosi visit, the 2024 election cycle, and the chip-export-control regime all revolve around the question of what happens to this city.
What it gives the world
Every NVIDIA H100, every Apple A18, every AMD MI300, every Tesla FSD chip, every TPU. The foundry model that decoupled design from manufacturing and made the modern fabless industry possible. A demonstration of small-state industrial policy at maximum effectiveness.