In March, there were

"Just imagine a particle or a dust particle falling into this," Mr Ninios says to me incredulously. "The transistors are not going to work. So all of this is cleaner than hospital operating rooms."Taiwan does not have special access to the raw materials - but it has the know-how to stay years ahead of other companies in the intricate process of producing these atomic building blocks of modern life.

Some in the Taiwanese government are cautious about spreading the frontier of this technology off the island. Trump wasted little time in claiming the firm's decision to bring its highest level of technology to the US was due to his economic policies.He said this would not have happened without the stick of his planned tariffs on Taiwan and semiconductors. Those I speak to at TSMC are diplomatic about that claim.Much of this was already planned and subsidised under former US President Biden's Chips Act.

On the walkway into the building are photographs showing Biden's visit in 2022, with the building site draped in the Stars and Stripes and a banner saying "a future Made in America"."The semiconductor supply chain is global," says TSMC Arizona President Rose Castanares. "There's really no single country at this moment that can do everything from chemicals to wafer manufacturing to packaging, and so it's very difficult to unwind that whole thing very quickly."

As for the semiconductor supply chain, tariffs will not help. The supply chain stretches all over the world. Whether it's the silicon wafers from Japan, the machines required from the Netherlands, or mirrors from Germany, all sorts of materials from all around the world are required. Now, they could face import charges.

That said, TSMC's boss was quick off the mark in confirming the expansion of the US site at an event with Trump at the White House. In recent weeks, America's tech elite - from Apple's Tim Cook, to Nvidia's Jensen Huang - have been queueing up to tell the world that TSMC Arizona will now produce many of the chips in their US products.Until several recent media interviews,

in which he defended his decision to stay in the 2024 race until a late stage, Biden had largely receded from public view since leaving power in January.If the former president has the energy and endurance to do so, this latest medical revelation might give him a new platform, and a newly sympathetic public, to attempt to defend and burnish his presidential legacy.

Over the course of his public life, Joe Biden has defined himself by his persistence and endurance, only reaching the pinnacle of American power late in life.His illness is another formidable challenge. But it presents one more opportunity for Biden to define himself – as a politician and as a man - by how he handles it.