"There's only so much I can spend," he says.

Parts of Chhattisgarh have seen a long-running insurgency by the rebels, who say they have been neglected by governments for decades. The Indian government has vowed to end their insurgency by the end of March 2026.Rao, an engineer by training, was the general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) group. He was on the most wanted list of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) - India's counter-terrorism law enforcement body.

Vivekanand Sinha, a senior police official in Chhattisgarh, said the gunfight in which Rao and the others died, broke out in the Narayanpur district following an intelligence tip-off that senior Maoist leaders were in the area.Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on X that he was "proud of our forces for this remarkable success".The Communist Party of India, meanwhile, has condemned the killings and called for an independent inquiry.

Last month, the Indian government launched a massive military operation - known as Black Forest - targeting the group.Shah said on Wednesday that 54 rebels had been arrested so far, and 84 had surrendered in the states of Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Maharashtra, as a result.

The operation was launched after the Maoists said they were ready for talks with the government if it halted its offensive and withdrew its troops. Chhattisgarh officials said any dialogue must be unconditional.

The Maoists are inspired by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. Their insurgency began in West Bengal state in the late 1960s and has since spread to more than a third of India's 600 districts.Konstantinos Ninios, an engineer, shows me some of the very first productions from TSMC Arizona: a silicon wafer with what is known as "4 nanometre chips".

"This is the most advanced wafer in the US right now," he explains. "[It] contains about 10 to 14 trillion transistors... The whole process is 3,000 to 4,000 steps."If you could somehow shrink your body to the same scale and get inside the wafer, he says that the many different layers would look like very tall streets and skyscrapers.

TSMC was founded at the behest of the Taiwanese government in 1987, when chip executive Morris Chang was directed to start the business. The model was to become a dedicated foundry for microchips, manufacturing other companies' designs. It became wildly successful.Driving the advancement of the technology is the miniaturisation of the smallest feature on chips. Their size is measured these days in billionths of a metre or nanometres. This progress has enabled mobile phones to become smartphones, and is now setting the pace for the mass deployment of artificial intelligence.