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President Trump is hinting that his upcoming tariffs on foreign chips could be double or triple the 100% rate he threatened to impose just one week ago.
This morning, Trump spoke with reporters on Air Force One while en route to Alaska for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He brought up the US economy, noting that the US has "hundreds of factories all over the country, and that includes auto factories [and] AI factories.
"They’re all coming in because they want to beat the tariffs," Trump added. “Because if they open here, they don’t have to pay tariffs. If they don’t open here, they have to pay, in some cases 200%, 300%. I haven’t even set some of the tariffs yet."
“I’ll be setting tariffs next week, and the week after, on steel and on, I would say, chips,” he said. “Chips and semiconductors we’ll be setting sometime next week, week after.”
Trump also mentioned his tariffs will start low before ramping up. “We’re gonna have a rate that is going to be lower at the beginning. That gives them a chance to come in and build. And very high after a certain period of time. And if they don’t build here, they have to pay a very high tariff, which doesn’t work. So they’ll come and build.”
The ticking clock suggests Apple, Nvidia, and TSMC might only enjoy exemptions from chip tariffs for a limited time. Last week, Taiwan and South Korea said they expect TSMC and Samsung to be exempt from the chip tariffs after Trump said he'd impose "100% tariff on all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States. But if you’ve made a commitment to build or are in the process of building, as many of you are, there’s no tariff.”
In the meantime, the entire tech industry is bracing for the tariffs, which risk inflating the cost of not only PC processors but also electronics across the board, depending on how they’re implemented. The Trump administration previously exempted computers, phones, and monitors from the president’s “reciprocal tariffs” but signaled that semiconductor-focused tariffs would target them later on.