Trump to impose 25% to 100% tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, impacting TSMC
Trump to impose 25% to 100% tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, impacting TSMC
www.tomshardware.com
Trump to impose 25% to 100% tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, impacting TSMC
194 comments
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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.
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More so when these plants take 10 years to build. They will pass along the cost and just wait him out.
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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.
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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.
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Also, because these investments are long-term when the tariffs are likely to only be short term.
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That's just how tariffs work. They're not a weapon against enemy nations. They're a tax on Americans.
And nobody is going to bring production back to this fascist slave pen of a country.
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Yeah but what corporation is going to think of the obvious solution?
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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.
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Or Mexico! We're already on it. Sheinbaum is working to get a chip manufacturing plant up in Guadalajara. Exciting stuff, honestly.
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Hell, use the waste heat to power hot water heaters or something. It blows my mind that we don't do more cloud computing in cold environments. The servers produce heat, the people need heat, solve one problem with another. Instead we seem to be putting them in the driest and hottest climates available.
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Indeed. My Alienware doubles as a space heater in my north facing office.
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So, US is finally getting EU hardware prices
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Probably Aussie hardware prices at this rate.
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LOL
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Can the fat fuck die from a coronary already?
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Look at Henry Kissinger. If left to nature, Trump will live to be 120.
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I hate it that you're so right about this.
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I think it will not solve the problem. Look, 70 million Americans voted for felon
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What a goddamn dumb fuck
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So where is the US going to get its chips from then tax TMSC makes over 90% of chips?
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TSMC was supposed to open a plant in the US, but apparently that takes a bit of time to get running.
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China I get, but Taiwan ? It's literally a US-proxy state
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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.
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I mean Puerto Rico is literally part of the US and that doesn't seem to matter for them.....
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Ah yes. Our sworn enemy: Taiwan.
It would be comical if it wasn't so sad.
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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.
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Trump is a chinese puppet apparently
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Russian revenge for the sanctions.
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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.
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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?
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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
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Taiwan are very clear about this; they (correctly) consider their monopoly on high end chip manufacturing to be an urgent matter of national defence and it is of the highest priority to them to keep it solely within Taiwan. They will never allow their best processes to be exported.
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It's already fabbing chips
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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for the foreseeable future.
Or 4 years, whichever comes first.
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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.
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It's going to impact American consumers a hell of a lot more.
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But I thought the Tim Apple donation to the trump inauguration was supposed to curry enough favor to avoid this.
ThisIsMySurpisedFace.jpg.
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Oh he did, there were supposed to be 500% tariffs /s
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Awesome. More availability for the rest of us.
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You mean we finally can get a gpu?
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Best I can do is a GPU box with a rock in it
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Lol, I'd love to watch everyone in the US paying triple for literally anything that has electronics in it.
If Trump then wants to build chips in the US, good luck. ASML is the only one with the machines, first of all, and by the time he can buy those, something tells me they might have some extra tarifs added to them, and then paying US salaries for electronics would skyrocket prices to people having to pay four-five times the amount of what they're paying now.
Not saying that the near slavery conditions in Asia are fine, that should have changed decades ago, but the way trump is doing this is hilarious, people will want his head on a plattee
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iirc the machines that TSMC uses are made in Holland right when he's also apparently doing his best to piss of Europe, even then there's like a decade long order backlog.
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They are made in the Netherlands, yeah. ASML
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Or at least buy the GPU now.
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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
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I did mine a couple months ago because I anticipated this happening.
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How to reunite China and Taiwan 101
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Peace in our time, what a great deal maker!
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Trump is basically a sad fat kid in a classroom that just cries and screams when shit doesn't go his way and then ruins everything for everyone else.
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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".
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Surely this will bring egg prices down.
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more AI but less compute please make it make sense
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thats one way to make sure openai can stay competitive
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As someone who actually approves $$ for tech vendors in an American company, I can tell you that no matter how cheaply China-based services become, they still aren't going to be seriously considered. Anthropic and OpenAI are based out of San Francisco. Legal jurisdiction to resolve contract disputes, breaches of confidentiality, etc. can be resolved in a fairly straightforward way between two American companies, especially when they are headquartered in the same court district.
Chinese companies exist inside of a legal safe harbor where they have less incentive to play by the rules, and a much lower risk of consequences for getting caught breaking them. The risk isn't worth the perceived savings.
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lol is he even trying to hide being a Russian puppet anymore?
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And they’re not even trying to create American jobs with this crap. The CHIPS Act is paired with a “chipmaker’s visa,” which intends to import cheap labor from Taiwan to work the US chip factories.
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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.
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Will this affect cpu prices? I don't know much about my computer's gut's guts
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The most cutting-edge chips are made in Taiwan. Hardly any (if any) chip foundry comes close to the quality they export. It will raise prices of nearly everything in a PC as consumers will probably buy up the remaining stock of modern hardware as an alternative.
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Good news nobody is hyped for NVIDIA 5000
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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.
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Trump is going to use Tariffs to try to offset making larger tax cuts for the wealthy.
It’s better that he does this now so that we have a solid recent example to point to of how this will impact what we pay for goods.
Never mind we have 100 years of data backing this up, people are idiots and won’t recognize the treat until it hurts them directly.
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In a way I’m glad he’s doing this. He’s going to inflect so much pain that he loses in a landslide in four or 8 years or whatever. If income tax rates are 0, then a new administration would be able to set them as high as they want without consideration of trying to increase them by 2 percent or whatever they do now.
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I agree I’d rather Trump shit the bed hard and early so we can contain the damage and show the public at large what his policies will really do to them.
But Tariffs will never be enough to offset income tax completely. I think he is going to use Tariffs to offset renewing his tax cuts for the wealthy. There are a good number of house republicans who will not go along with tax cuts if it increases the deficit. Revenue from tariffs would give him enough cover to placate those Republicans while directly pushing the cost onto US consumers who are primarily lower and middle classes.
Even after 4 years when he is out of office and the next administration reduces those tariffs and goes back to a progressive tax system. Even reducing those tariffs then will never bring prices down. Companies will never pass those savings entirely to the consumer they will pocket the money and everyone else will be screwed.
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To be fair, we mostly have examples of how free trade reduces prices. But this reduction in prices usually wasn't instantaneous and perceivable by ordinary folks. Because corporations wouldn't hand out the savings to consumers until the very slow market force of competition forced them to. Tariffs will make everything more expensive and even if they are eventually culled, stuff will not become suddenly cheap again.
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I agree, I doubt very much that price savings for any reduction in Tariffs will be passed onto the consumer. However any increase in Tariffs will immediately be felt.
I’d rather see an increase in a single sector such as microchips to show the public the costs of Trump’s plan in real modern dollars to help build opposition. Than wait until he pushes an across the board Tariff. Which would likely result in a stagflation for the population at large.
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Wildly bad ideas at exactly the right time in history to do the most damage.
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It does not make any sense
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That’s because syphilis hasn’t mushed your brain
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Wat
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gosh Tim. How is that million dollar personal contribution
directly into Trump’s pocketto Trump’s inauguration fund working out for you? -
Trump is just adhering to US policy.
194 comments
In the end, only the customer pays extras.
Trumpets cannot comprehend this
They will first go "I don't buy those damn consoles and gamer PCs every few years", then find out once their new iPhones will be much more expensive...