Donald Trump’s global tariff regime is endangering his ambitions of encouraging domestic chip production while hampering US goals of dominating the race to develop world-beating artificial intelligence.
Industry insiders, including tech executives, supply chain experts and analysts, said the US president’s escalating trade war is likely to hinder the expansion of American computing power. This is because the measures may drive up costs for building semiconductor fabrication plants and AI data centres in the US.
The tech sector’s concern is that the effort to force greater onshoring of the chip and electronics manufacturing will have the unintended effect of holding back the likes of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft which are seeking to beat counterparts in China in building advanced AI.