President Donald Trump says he's imposing a 100% tariff on computer chips— a move that raises the specter of higher prices for electronics, autos, household appliances and other essential goods that depend on the processors.
Wouldn’t this only affect goods manufactured in the USA? If a finished product containing chips from say, Europe, were to land on USA shores it would only have a 15% tariff right?
It’s a tax of 100% on chips being imported to the USA, having been manufactured elsewhere. The idea is that it should force companies to set up their own chip manufacturing in the USA. But that’s expensive and slow to do, and requires a lot of specialized engineering talent, so US-based electronics companies will somehow have to survive through years of paying twice as much for the chips they build into their products. This will mean significant price increases for Americans buying electronics, as the unavoidable costs are passed on.
The comments were Trump’s strongest criticism of the bipartisan CHIPS Act to date. “We don’t have to give them money,” Trump said, suggesting that avoiding new tariffs would be enough to convince them to build U.S. factories.
I think that, insofar as Trump has a coherent view, that’s it: he doesn’t want to give companies money to establish chip manufacturing in the USA, because he thinks it can be done instead by bullying them with tariffs so they are forced to fund it themselves if they want to stay in business.
I’m not saying that’s a wise view. There’s a good chance he just ends up creating more economic problems at home. And it’s in part driven by his desire to get revenge on Biden by undoing everything he did, rather than a rational appraisal of economics.
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
You’d guess wrong. Welcome to the wonderful world of tariffs and import/export controls!
I wouldn’t call it a trivial dodge because the act of building the tariffed good into another product takes time and resources at the origin side, then again at the destination side to undo the manufacturing steps. However, sometimes its worth it to a company. There are lots of examples of companies doing exactly this.
Ford Transit Connect cargo vans were made in Turkey. Ford wanted to import them to the USA. However, there was a tariff placed on vehicles for commercial use, so Ford installed cheap passengers seats in the back and imported them as passenger vehicles. As soon as the vehicles would arrive onshore in the USA, Ford would rip the cheap seats out, and sell them as commercial vehicles.
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US. Those chips can run more than $1k, while those Anbernic devices tend to run a couple hundred, so the small overhead would absolutely be worth being taxed at 15% instead of 100%.
Surely regulators have learned from the Ford Transit thing…
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
I don’t, but these new tariffs don’t match what we’d had before.
The closest I can think of is one scheme to avoid aluminum import tariffs. A company cut bar stock into longer lengths and did the cheapest/fastest/worst job of spot welding them together into the shape of a finished good (a chair or table, can’t remember). The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US.
It would be cheaper, but not inexpensive. This would require setting up an entire manufacturing assembly line to create and assemble the carrier product, and a reciprocal dis-assembly line on the other side to reclaim the desired CPU part. Its doable, but quite a bit of additional expense when the straight non-bypass method is a robot removing a CPU from a tray and inserting it directly into the finished product. Would it be worth it? Potentially yes! That’s why I made my first post here on the topic.
The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
Lol. That’s basically the same thing as I suggested for PC part swaps.
Thanks for the example. Let’s see what happens w/ the tariffs and how industry responds, because I highly doubt datacenters would be happy paying 2x for their parts.
Huh? No, it’s the opposite. You should really look up how tariffs work. They drive up prices for goods manufactured outside the US. Local goods are unaffected, giving them a competitive advantage.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious. You do know that the vast majority of the chips in all the devices you use are not manufactured in the US? Doubling the prices of the chips imported to manufacture devices here will obviously jack up the prices of those devices
The real problem seems to be that none of the news articles try to dig into what Trump’s vague and ambiguous wording actually means. They just report his nonsense verbatim. Does “building in the USA” mean building chips or building products containing chips?
The tariffs only apply to the imported products. That’s how tariffs work. If you import components into a US product then you only pay the tariff on those components, not the entire product.
Pretty sure that’s their point. Say a product costs $100 dollars with no tariffs. If you import the product from the EU with a 15% tariff, it’s now $115 with tariffs (assuming no tariffs importing the chips into the EU). If you manufacture the product in the US, you need to pay 100% tariffs for all the chips. Obviously the impact depends on how much the chips cost relative to the entire product, but if the chips are half the cost ($50), then with a 100% tariff you’re now paying $150 for the product manufactured in the US.
Looking into it, the US implementation goes down into the components, so yes. Except, I believe it’d be $50 chip @ 100%, other components at whatever tariff rates they may have, and then the 15% per-country/region tariff applies to all of it on top. So if the other components have no tariffs, it’d be $172.50. I’m now wondering how expensive everything would end up if you have tariffs on materials as well.
In any case though, it becomes ludicrously expensive no matter what because you’re at most dodging the 15%.
EDIT: You can also dodge some of the tariffs if some percentage of the product is made in the US. I wonder if you’d be able to dodge the chip tariff if the materials for it were partially sourced from the US. If possible, that’d probably be cheaper for companies than actually trying to manufacture chips here.
EDIT 2: Actually your calculation may be right, I’m having a hard time finding how they’re actually meant to be calculated. Admittedly it seems a bit weird to me that the rate would override the country-specific rate and thus be the same for chips from the EU and China, but I suppose none of this makes sense in the first place.
Sounds like you can save 85% by putting some googly eyes on the chip and calling it a finished product. It’s Chippy, the pointy pet that fits in your pocket.
If there is no alternative from US, the price of that product category as whole will rise, ultimately being paid by US citizens, meaning it is just a hidden tax rise 😘
Read all of the comments here. I’m not disagreeing that it would drive prices up, I’m disagreeing that there would be tariffs on American products, because that’s not how tariffs work.
This feels like semantics. Sure, domestically made products wouldn’t have tariffs directly applied. But they will still increase in price as a result of this policy.
Which most of us here have reduced to “prices will rise on USA made products as a result of these tariffs”.
So yes, tariffs aren’t applied to domestic productions directly, but the end product will still cost more and the reason will be the tariffs.
I think they assume that a USA device would have tariff only on the imported chips inside, whereas a device from another country would have its chips tariffed, as well as an additional tariff on the full device when imported.
I don’t know if this is the case or not because Trump is unclear and as others have pointed out this would be trivial to evade if components aren’t tariffed separately.
No matter what those in the USA would be paying more for electronics.
This was a few days ago but wasn’t it the case that imported chips to be used in American products would be tariffed at the time of import? Why wouldn’t that be the case?
Wouldn’t this only affect goods manufactured in the USA? If a finished product containing chips from say, Europe, were to land on USA shores it would only have a 15% tariff right?
Why does trump hate American manufacturing?
It’s a tax of 100% on chips being imported to the USA, having been manufactured elsewhere. The idea is that it should force companies to set up their own chip manufacturing in the USA. But that’s expensive and slow to do, and requires a lot of specialized engineering talent, so US-based electronics companies will somehow have to survive through years of paying twice as much for the chips they build into their products. This will mean significant price increases for Americans buying electronics, as the unavoidable costs are passed on.
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He’s been trying to prevent the US from manufacturing their own chips, so that can’t be the real goal…
https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-wants-kill-527-billion-semiconductor-chips-subsidy-law-2025-03-05/
From that article:
I think that, insofar as Trump has a coherent view, that’s it: he doesn’t want to give companies money to establish chip manufacturing in the USA, because he thinks it can be done instead by bullying them with tariffs so they are forced to fund it themselves if they want to stay in business.
I’m not saying that’s a wise view. There’s a good chance he just ends up creating more economic problems at home. And it’s in part driven by his desire to get revenge on Biden by undoing everything he did, rather than a rational appraisal of economics.
I’m guessing the chip in the finished product would be taxed separately, otherwise it would be trivial to dodge the tariff (just package the chip in a different “finished product” and move it to a US-made product).
You’d guess wrong. Welcome to the wonderful world of tariffs and import/export controls!
I wouldn’t call it a trivial dodge because the act of building the tariffed good into another product takes time and resources at the origin side, then again at the destination side to undo the manufacturing steps. However, sometimes its worth it to a company. There are lots of examples of companies doing exactly this.
Ford Transit Connect cargo vans were made in Turkey. Ford wanted to import them to the USA. However, there was a tariff placed on vehicles for commercial use, so Ford installed cheap passengers seats in the back and imported them as passenger vehicles. As soon as the vehicles would arrive onshore in the USA, Ford would rip the cheap seats out, and sell them as commercial vehicles.
Do you have examples of individual components being swapped to avoid tariffs?
For PC parts, it would be very inexpensive to make a cheap mobo, chassis, and UX. E.g., they could put a high end server CPU or something into one of those small handhelds (like Anbernic devices), and then move it to an actual server in the US. Those chips can run more than $1k, while those Anbernic devices tend to run a couple hundred, so the small overhead would absolutely be worth being taxed at 15% instead of 100%.
Surely regulators have learned from the Ford Transit thing…
I don’t, but these new tariffs don’t match what we’d had before.
The closest I can think of is one scheme to avoid aluminum import tariffs. A company cut bar stock into longer lengths and did the cheapest/fastest/worst job of spot welding them together into the shape of a finished good (a chair or table, can’t remember). The “chairs” were imported, then the receiving company simply broken the simple spot welds and fed the again-bar-stock into manufacturing processes.
It would be cheaper, but not inexpensive. This would require setting up an entire manufacturing assembly line to create and assemble the carrier product, and a reciprocal dis-assembly line on the other side to reclaim the desired CPU part. Its doable, but quite a bit of additional expense when the straight non-bypass method is a robot removing a CPU from a tray and inserting it directly into the finished product. Would it be worth it? Potentially yes! That’s why I made my first post here on the topic.
Lol. That’s basically the same thing as I suggested for PC part swaps.
Thanks for the example. Let’s see what happens w/ the tariffs and how industry responds, because I highly doubt datacenters would be happy paying 2x for their parts.
The existing tariffs somehow exclude chips or phones/computers with chips in them. This would be a separate category, like metals.
Huh? No, it’s the opposite. You should really look up how tariffs work. They drive up prices for goods manufactured outside the US. Local goods are unaffected, giving them a competitive advantage.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious. You do know that the vast majority of the chips in all the devices you use are not manufactured in the US? Doubling the prices of the chips imported to manufacture devices here will obviously jack up the prices of those devices
Why wouldn’t I be serious? If they’re manufactured outside the US then they’re obviously not manufactured in the US?
I believe they’re referring to products made in the USA that contain chips.
As in importing chips would be 100% but importing a product that contains chips would be 15%?
The real problem seems to be that none of the news articles try to dig into what Trump’s vague and ambiguous wording actually means. They just report his nonsense verbatim. Does “building in the USA” mean building chips or building products containing chips?
The tariffs only apply to the imported products. That’s how tariffs work. If you import components into a US product then you only pay the tariff on those components, not the entire product.
Right.
Isn’t that in agreement with OP? Any products made in USA that contain chips will cost more to make due to the 100% tariff on the chips.
No, OP said it only applied to US products. It’s applied to all imported products. That’s what a tariff is.
So any product containing chips will have a 100% tariff applied?
Edit: product imported to the USA
Pretty sure that’s their point. Say a product costs $100 dollars with no tariffs. If you import the product from the EU with a 15% tariff, it’s now $115 with tariffs (assuming no tariffs importing the chips into the EU). If you manufacture the product in the US, you need to pay 100% tariffs for all the chips. Obviously the impact depends on how much the chips cost relative to the entire product, but if the chips are half the cost ($50), then with a 100% tariff you’re now paying $150 for the product manufactured in the US.
Surely the tariff would apply separately, so the imported cost would be $157.50 ($50 chip @ 100% tariff + $50 everything else @ 15% tariff).
If they didn’t apply separately, the tariff would be trivial to dodge.
Looking into it, the US implementation goes down into the components, so yes. Except, I believe it’d be $50 chip @ 100%, other components at whatever tariff rates they may have, and then the 15% per-country/region tariff applies to all of it on top. So if the other components have no tariffs, it’d be $172.50. I’m now wondering how expensive everything would end up if you have tariffs on materials as well.
In any case though, it becomes ludicrously expensive no matter what because you’re at most dodging the 15%.
EDIT: You can also dodge some of the tariffs if some percentage of the product is made in the US. I wonder if you’d be able to dodge the chip tariff if the materials for it were partially sourced from the US. If possible, that’d probably be cheaper for companies than actually trying to manufacture chips here.
EDIT 2: Actually your calculation may be right, I’m having a hard time finding how they’re actually meant to be calculated. Admittedly it seems a bit weird to me that the rate would override the country-specific rate and thus be the same for chips from the EU and China, but I suppose none of this makes sense in the first place.
Incorrect. Once again, tariffs are only for imported products. That’s how tariffs work.
I’m convinced you’re a troll/bot. That is not in fact how tariffs work since the chips are not made in the US.
Sounds like you can save 85% by putting some googly eyes on the chip and calling it a finished product. It’s Chippy, the pointy pet that fits in your pocket.
What about situations where there are no alternative us made products
Then there are no US products to affect?
Are you a troll?
Or do you really not get it??
I honestly don’t get whatever “it” is. Again, if you don’t understand what a tariff is, it’s very simple to look it up. Don’t take my word for it.
If there is no alternative from US, the price of that product category as whole will rise, ultimately being paid by US citizens, meaning it is just a hidden tax rise 😘
I agree but that’s not what we were discussing
Read all of the comments here, there are many stating why this would drive costs way up.
Read all of the comments here. I’m not disagreeing that it would drive prices up, I’m disagreeing that there would be tariffs on American products, because that’s not how tariffs work.
This feels like semantics. Sure, domestically made products wouldn’t have tariffs directly applied. But they will still increase in price as a result of this policy.
Which most of us here have reduced to “prices will rise on USA made products as a result of these tariffs”.
So yes, tariffs aren’t applied to domestic productions directly, but the end product will still cost more and the reason will be the tariffs.
I think we agree now, yes?
They increase demand for domestic goods and therefor raise the price of goods that were already more expensive than the imported goods.
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So you’re an AI right? Like no real person would believe this
WTF are you talking about? Did you not go to elementary school?
I feel like there must be a miscommunication/misunderstanding here.
Agreed.
No, they’re trolling. There’s zero chance this was explained this many times and they’re still fighting like they don’t understand what is being said
I think they assume that a USA device would have tariff only on the imported chips inside, whereas a device from another country would have its chips tariffed, as well as an additional tariff on the full device when imported.
I don’t know if this is the case or not because Trump is unclear and as others have pointed out this would be trivial to evade if components aren’t tariffed separately.
No matter what those in the USA would be paying more for electronics.
“Trolling” = discussing facts? You are the one who doesn’t understand. It’s very simple: US tariffs do not apply to US products.
This was a few days ago but wasn’t it the case that imported chips to be used in American products would be tariffed at the time of import? Why wouldn’t that be the case?