At the time, it didn't look like the beginning of anything serious. A manufacturing delay. A logistics hiccup. The kind of disruption that happens in global supply chains every few months. But what unfolded in the months that followed wasn't a disruption. It was a revelation. The world had built its entire digital infrastructure on a single point of failure. And that point had a name: Taiwan. By late 2024, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—TSMC—was producing more than 90% of the world's most advanced chips. The ones that powered smartphones, data centers, military drones, AI systems, electric vehicles. Everything that mattered in the 21st century ran on silicon designed in California, manufactured in Hsinchu, and shipped to every corner of the globe. But the chips were only part of the equation. What made Taiwan irreplaceable wasn't just the factories. It was the knowledge. The decades of expertise compressed into nanometer-scale precision. The machines that cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, built by a Dutch company and controlled by international agreements. The workforce trained in processes so complex that replicating them elsewhere would take years, maybe a decade. And all of it sat 110 miles from mainland China. Nobody called it a crisis. Not yet.