Trump to impose 25% to 100% tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, impacting TSMC
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What a goddamn dumb fuck
China I get, but Taiwan ? It's literally a US-proxy state
I'm sure that orange fuck will try to sell it to "beautiful" president Xi, or to clean it out to stop the conflict, or something like that, that bubbles up in his senile demented brain.
Awesome. More availability for the rest of us.
So where is the US going to get its chips from then tax TMSC makes over 90% of chips?
TSMC was supposed to open a plant in the US, but apparently that takes a bit of time to get running.
Awesome! Send them to Canada, we can build data centres and sell the cloud services back to Americans powered by the electricity that we expect to be tarriffed, and cooled by the water we won't sell.
Or Mexico! We're already on it. Sheinbaum is working to get a chip manufacturing plant up in Guadalajara. Exciting stuff, honestly.
He emphasized that the proposed tariffs would leave companies with no choice but to invest in domestic production facilities to avoid high taxes.
No choice except the obvious: Pass the cost of the Tax into the customer because there’s no way they’re going to spend billions to stand up a US fab plant anytime soon.
No choice except the obvious: Pass the cost of the Tax into the customer because there’s no way they’re going to spend billions to stand up a US fab plant anytime soon.
TSMC is standing up fabs in the US, mostly because we're bribing them to do so.
The problem is that it takes literal years to build high tech manufacturing and isn't something you can yank out of your ass to satisfy some idiot politician.
By Taiwanese law, TSMC isn't allowed to move cutting edge processes to its US plant. The overseas operations have to be at least one gen behind.
From a strategic point of view, it makes sense for the Taiwan government to do this. They don't want the US to suck them dry then cut a deal with the mainland.
More so when these plants take 10 years to build. They will pass along the cost and just wait him out.
Also, because these investments are long-term when the tariffs are likely to only be short term.
Yeah but what corporation is going to think of the obvious solution?
Trump is a chinese puppet apparently
Russian revenge for the sanctions.
The dismantling of the US was Putins wet dream since forever, he would have done the same with or without the well deserved sanctions for invading Ukraine.
Wait until his voters see their toy prices flying up
His voters seem to think it's Taiwan that pays the tariffs.
Can the fat fuck die from a coronary already?
Look at Henry Kissinger. If left to nature, Trump will live to be 120.
I hate it that you're so right about this.
Isn't the 2A to bring down tyrant governments?
indeed, so please stop beating the 1a to death and use your 2a to do something
What is 2a?
I think it will not solve the problem. Look, 70 million Americans voted for walking fox news
So, US is finally getting EU hardware prices
Probably Aussie hardware prices at this rate.
But I thought the Tim Apple donation to the trump inauguration was supposed to curry enough favor to avoid this.
ThisIsMySurpisedFace.jpg.
Oh he did, there were supposed to be 500% tariffs /s
And in two weeks there will be a special executive order to free his Tech Bro oligarch buddies from these tarrifs so Meta and Elmo are not forced to pay a dollar extra.
I've been looking at doing a new pc build but wanted to wait for the new GPUs coming out. Looks like I should just my new build before prices are stupid.
I did mine a couple months ago because I anticipated this happening.
Or at least buy the GPU now.
I built my system in 2019 and and everything needs upgraded. I also wanted to switch to AMD, so figured I'd just do a full build
I don't get the goal here. It's not just that existing fabs are in Taiwan, I thought it was the knowledge was as well.
I was under the impression that we'd built a couple of fabs here and they're not productive due to a knowledge deficit. Maybe I'm uninformed.
It seems, to my uninformed self, that if we impose tariffs we'd be strengthening Taiwan/China relations. Wouldn't China still serve as a middle man?
I don't see us manufacturing when the dollar is so high relative to foreign currency; add in the lack of knowledge and facilities and I'm not sure what you get.
I truly believe these are his way of soliciting bribes from foreign and domestic businesses.
They're going to have to pay him to get around them.
How to reunite China and Taiwan 101
Peace in our time, what a great deal maker!
If TSMC doesn't want to set up shop in the USA, are the USA going to be able to produce chips on par with what TSMC can fab?
they are building a plant in Arizona, but i doubt it'll ever be as good as Taiwan can do, not just because Taiwan has the skills but if Taiwan doesn't have this then what's the point of protecting it? It's sort of a way to say, if you want to to continue to access the best chips in the world you should protect us from China
I believe the plant is operational, as they have bragged about "great production tests". What I haven't heard of is any orders placed for that plant's products.
The US could probably do it... With hundreds of billions of government incentives to rapidly stand up the entire supply chain... Which would still take at least a decade. The machines that TSMC uses are made by ASML and themselves have a global supply chain of over 500 separate companies and are backordered for several years due to their inherent value.
In short, no.
It will take them 20 years to catch up to the 5-7 years they are behind, even with all the money in the world.
As you say, it's setting up the supply chain.
Intel has been trying to get itself into that position for years, with huge amounts of public money being pumped in, and it is struggling so badly the company lost patience and fired the CEO who had the best chance of getting this done. And, as others have said, it doesn't look like TSMC is about to let its US fabs do the most advanced stuff even if they could.
So this move will just make the best technology less accessible to the USA and tech products more expensive for Americans, for the foreseeable future.
From what I understand one of the things that is protecting Taiwan from China is their fabs. They will fight for their lives to make sure they are protected by this.
As someone with family over in Taiwan, I really want them to be okay. Things are getting depressing globally.
No
To avoid this, the administration would need to introduce exemptions, just like it did with China-made graphics cards and motherboards years ago.
If that is the approach, it would ensure tech monopoly for 5 years for all of the oligarchy that kisses his diaper.
More major issues with this is that while high end Chip production may be high value manufacturing, motherboards, electronics, and assembly is not, and there would likely be an export of chips to somewhere else to import finished products.
US/Trump explicit hatred for world is likely to get retributive tariffs, that makes chip plants unproductive investments, though Trump is hoping to have high foreign ownership/investment in those plants.
In 2022, the export share of Taiwan integrated circuits to US was just 2.46%, although in early 2024, total (all goods) Taiwan exports had US take lead over China for the first time.
That both US and China are decoupling from Taiwan is going to reduce any geopolitical subservience impulse that provokes a war with China. Taiwan may get closer to China instead of begging for more US "friendship".
Trump is just adhering to US policy.
more AI but less compute please make it make sense
People hyped for the Nvidia 5000 series better get their cards before prices skyrocket across the board. I guess graphics cards weren't expensive enough or something.
Really though, no brand is safe from the soon-to-be insane prices if this does go through as a blanket tariff without exceptions. Better to err on the safe side and upgrade soon as you can, if you need to and you're not too wealthy to care.
Will this affect cpu prices? I don't know much about my computer's gut's guts
Good news nobody is hyped for NVIDIA 5000
I've read some idiots online saying "you're dumb if you didn't wait for the 5000 series" based off of the revealed MSRP, as if the majority of people are ever going to buy at those prices (especially now with tariffs). What's likely is that consumers will pay far more to get relatively less improvement if they go with a 5000 series card.
There's enough sucker fanboys for Nvidia that they'll probably still sell though. Just like how there's people who will buy the new Call of Duty each year.
Maybe it'll bring chip prices down to Rest of the World™ to clear stock. Thanks Trump!
Nooe, they will just permanently raise prices everywhere and pocket bigger margins.
I say this not to be reactionary or pro trump.
Is there no way to use lesser nodes for wider applications? While there are processes that need as much speed as possible, I feel like what gives Taiwan semiconducting industries such great business is the fact that code optimization isn't as cost effective as the latest and greatest chips.
I HOPE these tariffs inspire better, more secure code to make less efficient chips more viable. Like a lemon to lemonade situation.
If you optimize code, it will still run faster if the CPU or GPU is 30% faster.
If you make 50% speed improvements with code, you get 65% improvement with code+hardware upgrades. The hardware multiplies your software gains.
Also, half of the gains in recent years have been in energy efficiency, not just speed.
So if the idea is to do more with less, you don’t wanna rely on old power-hungry designs.
