There are around a dozen companies on Earth, give or take, that the markets say are worth more than a trillion dollars. That club, of course, includes the giant, AI-focused tech companies that are always in the news: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Broadcom.

But the trillion-dollar club also includes the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. All those giant, AI-focused tech companies rely on TSMC to actually manufacture their most advanced computing chips. And that is apparently a pretty great business to be in right now.

TSMC reported a 39% increase in profits last quarter, compared to a year ago. It pulled in more than $33 billion in revenue last quarter alone. How’d they do it?

For one, the factories where TSMC makes its chips are a sight to behold.

“I mean, they are just massive. The scale and sophistication is almost beyond human imagination,” said Mike Schmidt, who researches industrial policy at Princeton University.

He’s been to those factories, or fabs. And he said a single one can be the size of 11 football fields.

“And at a given site, you know, they might have six or eight fabs operating side by side, totally interconnected with each other through internal subways that carry wafers from one fab to the other,” Schmidt said.

And the chips that come out, you have very likely used them today, said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University.

“TSMC is embedded in your life in many ways,” Prasad said.

The chips are used in smartphones, TVs, cars, computers. And, for AI users, ChatGPT queries run on chips made by TSMC.

“It has pretty much cornered the market for these high-performance, high-tech chips,” Prasad said.

TSMC makes the bulk of those chips in Taiwan, where the firm is headquartered. But it’s expanding production in the U.S., including in Arizona.

“And that is likely to increase over time,” said Prasad.

Driven in part by incentives offered by the U.S. government, which wants to make sure it can get the chips it needs, in case something happens to Taiwan. That’s according to Gil Luria, a tech analyst at DA Davidson.

“If China does pursue military action against Taiwan, there could be a disruption to the whole global supply chain,” Luria said.

But Luria said moving production of these very complicated chips to the U.S., will only happen bit by bit.

“This is a relatively small part of their capacity and it's capacity that takes a very long time to ramp up,” Luria said.

So for the foreseeable future, Luria said, Taiwan will remain the global center of chip making.