Trump's planned 100 percent computer chip tariff sparks confusion among businesses and trading partners
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'We'll be putting a tariff of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors,' Trump said in the Oval Office while meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook. 'But if you're building in the United States of America, there's no charge.'
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Wall Street investors interpreted that as good news not just for U.S. companies like AMD, Intel and Nvidia, but also for the biggest Asian chipmakers like Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company that have been working to build U.S. factories.
But it left greater uncertainty for smaller chipmakers in Europe and Asia that have little exposure to the AI boom but still make semiconductors inserted into essential products like cars or washing machines.
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These producers 'probably aren't large enough to get on the map for an exemption and quite probably wouldn't have the kind of excess capital and margins to be able to add investment at a large scale into the United States,' Chorzempa said.
The announcement came more than three months after Trump temporarily exempted most electronics from his administration's most onerous tariffs.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a shortage of computer chips increased the price of autos and contributed to higher inflation. Chorzempa said chip tariffs could again raise prices by hundreds of dollars per vehicle if the semiconductors inside a car are not exempt.
'There's a chip that allows you to open and close the window,' Chorzempa said. 'There's a chip that is running the entertainment system. There is a chip that's kind of running all the electronics. There are chips, especially in EVs, that are doing power management, all that kind of stuff.'
Much of the investment into building U.S. chip factories began with the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act that President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022, providing more than $50 billion to support new computer chip plants, fund research and train workers for the industry.
Trump has vocally opposed those financial incentives and taken a different approach, betting that the threat of dramatically higher chip costs would force most companies to open factories domestically, despite the risk that tariffs could squeeze corporate profits and push up prices for electronics.
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