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On the 7th floor of a skyscraping business tower, techies at defense firm Tron Future are designing the next generation of air defense.

The small defense and aerospace company, an hour’s drive southwest of Taiwan’s capital Taipei, launched in 2018 and is part of a cluster of companies making drones and anti-drone detection systems that have ramped up operations since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Now, new export controls on Chinese drone components announced by Beijing and coming into effect next year mean Taiwan is doubling down on its bet that drones become a central feature of modern warfare — and the island becomes a global hub to produce them.

“We see the potential, we see it’s happening and the government wants it to happen as well,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, Tron Future’s founder and chief executive officer. He said “there’s a lot of business happening between Taiwanese and U.S. companies.”

Taiwan is already a critical technology hub, producing 95 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips. Its local drone industry is working to match Chinese manufacturing to help the United States and other Western allies reduce their reliance on China.