Trump Administration Plans to Impose 25-100% Tariffs on Taiwan-Sourced Chips, Including TSMC

[Prima.Vera]

You do know that both AMD and Nvidia are US companies, and that all AIBs, no matter where their headquarters are, are making cards from US components (no matter where they are actually produced)?

How is that gonna affect US only?

Because, except nGreedia, most of the video card manufacturers are from China or Taiwan.

Best example for the RTX 5090 GPU, being sold by Assus for 400$ more than the FE....

 

[Why_Me]

Obviously Trump just invited TMSC to produce the chips in the USA,
Does not TSMC already building fabs in there?

This guy gets it ^^

 

[Onasi]

@Assimilator
Fair point. I decided not to delineate like this precisely for that reason - AI in the perception of most people IS what CS calls “strong AI”. There are expectations for those two letters, for better or worse. Of course, LLMs are technically AI, just an algorithm based “weak” one, but that is a distinction that usually gets omitted, hence all the nonsense takes we see later. Strong AI, however, remains an ever-elusive goal. Potentially unattainable. Certainly not using machine learning, at least not in its current form where most improvements come from efficiency upgrades to the data scraping process for LLM training. I just get annoyed at the industry trying to present things that are not what they proclaim to be. Way they love to market stuff like their “AI” in smartphones, for example, you would think we all now have personal AI goth GFs akin to Blade Runner 2049. Reality, as ever, is much more pedestrian.

 

[Bwaze]

Because, except nGreedia, most of the video card manufacturers are from China or Taiwan.

Best example for the RTX 5090 GPU, being sold by Assus for 400$ more than the FE....

"Assus" ( hue hue) also sold and will sell Reference model that is priced closer to MSRP (+ some Asus tax) - but they always also had much more expensive SKUs. That is, unless they focus on more expensive ones this round to raise their profit, there are a lot of angry voices from AIB partners that Nvidia placed RTX 5090 MSRP too low...

Of course, if there is really such a shortage, and such a demand from small business and content creators for AI acceleration, we're going to see cryptomadness levels of scalping straight from the partners.

 

[Onasi]

Because, except nGreedia, most of the video card manufacturers are from China or Taiwan.

Uh, well, hate to break it to you, but NV doesn’t actually manufacture their own cards themselves - that still is done via Taiwan partners. They design the FE, sure, but manufacturing itself isn’t US based.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

One thing comes to mind here, eating crow, it will happen sooner or later.

 

[Mack4285]

TSMC should respond by abandoning their factory in the U.S and recall all their personel back to Taiwan. Outsourcing their manufacturing technology this way only backstabs them. Very obvious now.

 

[halcyon]

I have no dog in this fight, nor am I a trump fan nor hater.

I just see the big pieces like this:

- World is deglobalizing, friend shoring, being divided up - it's a slow process, this is part of that process (read: M. Pettis, P. Zeihan, D. Alperovitch, G. S. Takach, RAND, PIEE)

- US needs (or sees it needs) to re-industrialize, which means drawing money, investments, opportunities and risk taking home (see previous, Brad Setser, esp. Peter Zeihan)

- The classic model for this is economics has been the Import Substitution Industrialization model, espoused by Raul Prebisch, and for some time successfully historically used by such countries as Argentina, Brazil, India and Mexico

- Basic idea ull in investments, tax imports highly, increase inflation AND domestic consumption, these drive economic growth and animal spirits, driving a self-enforcing loop of domestic industrial manufacturing investments (which is the goal)

Thus, expects, regardless of what the talking heads say or promise:

- higher US inflation
- higher tariffs, and thus, trade wars
- currency volatility esp vis-a-vis USD and EMA currencies (China peg will break)
- money escaping from periphery to US
- stories how this will be the new Golden Age of United states, which have already begun

Time will tell, whether it will work this time around. Over a long term it has always lead to inefficiencies, lack of competition and struggling economy. But it can boost rapid re-industrialization and domestic manufacturing investments in the short term for some time, if skilled labour is available to implement it (see the issue about H-1B VISAs, as boomers are exiting en masse, not enough Xers and millenials to fill that skill gap, need brain power from abroad to fill the gap).