OK. You most probably should have a fTPM / Intel Platform Trust Technology (PTT). It’s supported and enabled at startup. I don’t assume Asus has installed a discrete TPM in addition.
There are some reasons for this behaviour- some bioses have options to disable ME, fptw64 does have an option -disableme, it might happen after PCH got exchanged and ME no cleaned/ freshly initialized, might be hardware, too. In the best case this machine has a servce jumper which wasn’t removed from the shop, but I doubt that…
So if you can’t find any service jumper or service solderings pads bridged with a wire I’d recommend to clean re- configure the ME and begin with an empty NVRAM.
Cleaning ME:
After having cleaned the ME:
Empty NVRAM- the easiest thing would be to take a bios region from latest Asus bios update (has to be extracted) and to transfer the padding marked with a green arrow to this bios region, thereafter replacing the bios region as one piece.
Stock bios region with expanded NVRAM for comparison
That’s the easy part.
Since the ME region and FD are locked for writing, the bios might be protected by other means and since I suppose this machine doesn’t have a service jumper it’s the hardware programming, probably.
That’s the only way to re-enable an ME again, to my knowledge there’s no way by software, the region has to be re-flashed.
An easy but a little dangerous way to find out if the ME is disabled for servicing would be dumping the ME region and wrting it back unchanged instantly:
FPTW64 -ME -d ME.bin
FPTW64 -ME -f ME.bin
But this might- as all the other things discussed- brick your machine when going wrong. But most probably it’ll end with a simple error message.