President Trump re-iterates intention to impose tariffs on chips

President Trump has repeated that he intends to impose tariffs on semiconductor products, saying they would apply to “chips and things associated with chips.”

He spoke to press during a session in the Oval Office on Friday as he signed a number of executive orders.

Trump did not indicate whether chips tariffs would be country-specific or at what level they would be set. He has previously mentioned as Taiwan having taken 98 percent of the chip market and that he wants to help bring it back to the US. He has also said the tariffs could be set at 25, 50 or even 100 percent.

Trump’s discussion of Taiwan probably refers to the leading-edge of chip production at below 10nm, where TSMC has a technical lead and dominates the market with more than 90 percent of chip production.

However, the time table for the introduction of chip tariffs remains unclear.

Speaking of a meeting he held recently with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, Trump said: “He’s the biggest in the world in terms of chips, and I can’t say what’s going to happen, whether… We had a meeting, it was a good meeting. But eventually, we’re going to put tariffs on chips. We’re going to put tariffs on oil and gas. That’ll happen fairly soon, I think around the 18th of February.”

It appeared that the reference to February applied to oil and gas only with imports of semiconductor and pharmaceutical products and steel to follow.

Trump said: “So we’ll be doing pharmaceuticals importantly, and drugs, medicines, et cetera, all forms of medicine and pharmaceuticals. And we’ll be doing very importantly, steel. And we’ll also be doing chips and things associated with chips.”

Elsewhere, many analysts have spoken out against chip tariffs pointing out that TSMC works for a great many US-based fabless chip companies and the foundry would likely pass its costs on to them. This includes Nvidia, Qualcomm and almost all other significant chip companies. In addition, the global nature of the chip supply chain means that unless it is covered comprehensively, the tariffs move would likely backfire and persuade equipment makers to leave the US.