Without going into detail about what might happen to the $52 billion in subsidies from the CHIPS Act under his administration, Donald Trump said tariffs on foreign computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals are coming “in the near future.” He also namechecked DeepSeek’s AI releases, saying, “…coming up with a faster method of AI and less expensive, that’s good. I view that as a positive if it is fact and it is true, and nobody knows, but I view that as a positive.”
In the speech at the House GOP Issues Conference held at the Trump National Doral Resort in Miami Monday afternoon, he said that to return the production of these goods to the US, “we don’t want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program Biden has.” Instead the incentive for manufacturers will be “they will not want to pay a tax.”
Bloomberg reports that later, in comments to reports, Trump said he wanted a tariff rate “much bigger” than 2.5 percent.
This is despite the outcome of the trade war with China during his first administration that expanded China’s trade surplus with the US between 2018, when the tariffs began, and 2021. A CTA report from last year cited by TechCrunch said Trump’s proposed tariffs could increase prices on laptops and tablets by 46 percent, game consoles by 40 percent, and smartphones by 26 percent.
He also said that “we will have more plants built in the next short period of time than ever before because the incentive will be there,” however it’s unclear how many of those will be like The Stargate Project’s first datacenter in Texas, which was in the works well before the start of his administration. Last fall, the Commerce Department said that by then, it had “announced over $30 billion in proposed CHIPS private sector investments spanning 23 projects in 15 states” with 16 new manufacturing facilities in the works.
He also said of DeepSeek that “instead of spending billions you will spend less and hopefully come up with the same solution,” even as OpenAI, Softbank & co. say they’re preparing to spend $500 billion on AI datacenters.
Update, January 27th: Added details from Bloomberg.