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Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Trump's planned 100% computer chip tariff sparks confusion among businesses and trading partners
By Matt O'Brien and Mae Anderson President Donald Trump's ambiguous plans for 100% tariffs on computer chips that aren't made in the U.S. are stoking confusion among businesses and trading partners - boosting stocks for leading semiconductor companies while leaving smaller producers scrambling to understand the implications. "We are still waiting for official guidance," said Limor Fried, founder and engineer at Adafruit Industries, a small electronics maker in New York. The chips that go into Adafruit's products come through U.S. sales and distribution companies as well as direct from companies in the Philippines and Taiwan. If those chips aren't exempt from tariffs, "it would increase the costs that go into our designs as the semiconductors are the most expensive component in our assemblies," Fried said. "For many of these tariffs, we often have to wait until we get a bill to know our exposure, and then we adjust our pricing to account for the increases." The U.S. imports a relatively small number of chips because most of the foreign-made chips in a device - from an iPhone to a car - were already assembled into a product, or part of a product, before it landed in the country. "The real question everybody in the industry is asking is whether there will be a component tariff, where the chips in a device would require some sort of separate tariff calculation," said Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Trump said Wednesday that companies that "made a commitment to build" in the U.S. would be spared the import tax, even if they are not yet producing those chips in American factories. "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." Wall Street investors interpreted that as good news not just for U.S. companies like 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 artificial intelligence boom but still make semiconductors inserted into essential products like cars or washing machines. German chipmaker Infineon Technologies, which supplies chips to the auto industry, said in an emailed statement Thursday that it "can't speculate about potential semiconductor tariffs " and Trump's announcement, "as no official documents have been published at this point." These producers "probably aren't large enough to get on the mfor 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. It's also not clear how the chip-specific tariffs would apply to trading partners that already made broader deals with Trump - such as agreements with the European Union, Japan and South Korea that tax most goods at 15%. A trade group, the Semiconductor Industry Association, said Thursday it was "eager to learn more" about the planned chip tariffs, "including the scope and structure of exemptions." 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. Trump's announcement could be a signal for other chipmakers to imitate the investments that companies like South Korea's Samsung are making, said Long Le, a business professor at Santa Clara University. But with China's SMIC and Huawei unlikely to be exempted, it could also give the Trump administration "more leverage at the trading table" ahead of an upcoming deal with China, he said.
Time of India
31-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Is AI causing tech worker layoffs? That's what CEOs suggest, but the reality is complicated
By Matt O'Brien If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI . A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." The template for tech CEO layoff notices in 2025 includes an AI pivot. That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about 9%, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of 5% job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. AI spending, not replacement, is a more common factor Microsoft , which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last week it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. The role of AI in job replacement is hard to track One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers - which is kind of the canonical AI job - those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Economists are watching for AI's effects on entry-level tech jobs Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlwith the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said.
Time of India
31-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Is AI causing tech worker layoffs? That's what CEOs suggest, but the reality is complicated
By Matt O'Brien If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI . A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." The template for tech CEO layoff notices in 2025 includes an AI pivot. That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about 9%, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of 5% job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. AI spending, not replacement, is a more common factor Microsoft , which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last week it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. The role of AI in job replacement is hard to track One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers - which is kind of the canonical AI job - those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Economists are watching for AI's effects on entry-level tech jobs Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlwith the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said.
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
St. Cloud lawn care rules change: What to know about new fees, grass height requirement
There are new rules in St. Cloud when it comes to lawn care. With these rules, comes higher fees for noncompliance. The St. Cloud City Council on July 7 approved adjusting a city ordinance to lower the grass length limit from 10 inches to eight inches. The change is to comply with a state statute, which states the limit is eight inches. St. Cloud Health Director Matt O'Brien told city council members the city patrols grass length and issues citations after looking into resident complaints. More: St. Joseph detour, roundabout construction begins July 8 "How the procedure has historically gone is we would receive a complaint or identify long grass," O'Brien said. "We (then) take a tape measurer and measure the long grass to ensure that we are (above the) inches in our ordinance." If a property's grass is above the length requirement, O'Brien said property owners are given a notice with a period of time to correct it. If the owner doesn't make corrections, they would abate, meaning the city would coordinate lawn care to comply with local policies. 'What else is happening?': Parents question Sauk Rapids-Rice schools amid staff cuts "What this is doing is adding an additional tool in there where we can issue an administrative citation in addition to our ability to abate the violation, and then they get a $75 administrative fee on top of the abatement charge that we pay — it's generally a contractor we will hire, they'll bill us, we'll pay the bill along with the $75 administrative fee." With the change, the city can issue an administrative citation for the violation regardless of abatement. This would include another $100 fine in addition to the abatement fee and associated costs. Sign up for our alerts to receive the latest updates on important news. St. Cloud City Attorney Renee Courtney told the St. Cloud Times the property owner would be notified of the violation, and if it isn't corrected in the time specified in the notice, then the property owner would be fined a $100 administrative citation. If the violation continues after that, Courtney said the city may move forward with abatement. The property owner would then pay another $75 administrative fee for abatement alongside the costs to abate, such as the contractor's bill. "A property owner may have to pay all three if the violation continues and the property owner does not come into compliance," Courtney wrote in an email. Note to readers: If you appreciate the work we do here at The St. Cloud Times, please consider subscribing yourself or giving the gift of a subscription to someone you know. Corey Schmidt covers politics and courts for the St. Cloud Times. He can be reached at cschmidt@ This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: New St. Cloud lawn rules: What to know about fees, fines, grass length
Time of India
13-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Meta invests in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team
By Matt O'Brien Meta said Thursday it is making a large investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing "superintelligence" at the tech giant. The move reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a "strategic partnership and investment" with Scale late Thursday but didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. Scale said the added investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. Scale said it will remain an independent company but the agreement will "substantially expand Scale and Meta's commercial relationship." Meta will hold a minority of Scale's outstanding equity. Wang, though joining Meta, will remain on Scale's board of directors. Replacing him is a new interim Scale CEO Jason Droege, who was previously the company's chief strategy officer and had past executive roles at Uber Eats and Axon. It won't be the first time a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division. Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets. Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016. They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models - the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama - brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service "every leading large language model," including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as "one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet." Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. "How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?" LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models "basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way," LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in "tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman." When he returned to France's annual VivaTech conference again on Wednesday, LeCun dodged a question about the pending Scale deal but said his AI research team's plan has "always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it." "It's just that now we have a clearer vision for how to accomplish this," he said. LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau. Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research "remains unwavering" and described the work as "building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology."
