内容摘要：As well as the hum, mining's energy use has environmental impacts. A Harvard study published in March in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature Communications found that Bitcoin mining exposes millions of Americans to harmful air pollution each year - and that 34 Bitcoin mines consumed a third more electricity than the city of LA. (There was some pushback from the crypto industry to the study, which was called The environmental burden of the United States' Bitcoin mining boom.)

As well as the hum, mining's energy use has environmental impacts. A Harvard study published in March in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature Communications found that Bitcoin mining exposes millions of Americans to harmful air pollution each year - and that 34 Bitcoin mines consumed a third more electricity than the city of LA. (There was some pushback from the crypto industry to the study, which was called The environmental burden of the United States' Bitcoin mining boom.)

These machines shoot UV light tens of thousands of times through drops of molten tin, which creates a plasma, and is then refracted through a series of specialised mirrors.The almost entirely automated process for each wafer of silicon is repeated thousands of times in layers over months, before the $1m LP-sized wafer of 4nm silicon chips is formed.

"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.".

He said the perception of gay people had been "for the most part really positive"."Even some of the really religious people who are fundamentally against it, they're kind of more accepting of it," he said.

"They see that the sky didn't fall in, that they can still go to church, they can still pray, that none of their rights were taken away."Joe Biden's half-century in politics has been an exercise in overcoming adversity.