During a lengthy address to Congress, the US President called on Congress to “get rid” of the CHIPS Act, which provides federal subsidies to entice chipmakers to expand production in the US, and use the remaining allocated funds to “reduce debt or any other reason you want to”.
“We give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn't mean a thing,” President Trump said in his address. “They take our money and they don't spend it. We're giving them no money. All that was important to them was they didn't want to pay the tariffs, so they came in their building and many other companies are coming. We don't have to give them money.”
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Prior to his election victory, Trump threatened to replace the Biden-era programme with tariffs, unveiling plans post-election to introduce tariffs potentially as high as 100% on exports of semiconductors from Southeast Asia.
Trump’s speech to Congress was buoyed by the news that Apple and TSMC were among the companies looking to expand semiconductor production in the US in the wake of the tariff news.
TSMC unveiled plans at the White House on Monday to invest $100 billion in the US, adding to its $65 billion chip manufacturing project in Phoenix, Arizona, while Apple are believed to have pledged to spend $500 billion to expand operations in the country.
President Trump said: “[Apple CEO] Tim Cook called me. He said, I cannot spend it fast enough. It's going to be much higher than that, I believe. They'll be building their plants here instead of in China.
“And TSMC, the biggest in the world, most powerful in the world, has a tremendous amount, 97% of the market, announced a $165 billion investment to build the most powerful chips on Earth right here in the US. And we're not giving them any money.”
“We just want to protect our businesses and our people,” Trump said, claiming that more businesses will come to the US because they don’t want to pay the tariffs.
A twist of irony saw Trump call on the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, to reallocate the CHIPS Act funding. Johnson previously affirmed Trump’s plan to remove the CHIPS Act but would later walk back the comments, instead saying it would be streamlined.
In addition to his latest attack on the CHIPS Act, President Trump claimed that the $500 billion Stargate project wouldn’t have happened had Vice President Kamala Harris won the election.
“Thanks to our America-First policies we're putting into place, we have had $1.7 trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks,” the President said. “The combination of the election and our economic policies that people of SoftBank, one of the most brilliant anywhere in the world.”
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