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Sanctions on TSMC? Thought Trump was hiring smart people for a change!

TSMC is the only company in the world that can make chips at the small dimensions that enable the manufacturers of these end products to be competitive.

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In a recent speech to House Republicans on January 27, 2025, US President, Donald Trump, announced plans to impose substantial tariffs on imported semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and steel. He emphasized that companies "left us and went to Taiwan," and proposed that they should either return production to the United States, or face tariffs as high as "25%, 50%, or even a 100% tax."

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What!

I spend the past four years complaining about how US sanctions on China were ineffective, and only served to hurt the non-Chinese companies, and catalyze the growth of a home-grown semiconductor and semiconductor equipment industry. My latest article was posted on Substack just two days ago on January 27, 2025 entitled “DeepSeek: A Testament to Failed US Sanctions and the Evolving AI Landscape.”

Two weeks earlier, on Jan 10, 2025, I wrote a Substack article entitled “Gina Raimondo Admits China Sanctions a “Fool’s Errand” After 4 Years of Failure but Her Boss Doesn’t Agree.”

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So, I had hope when the Biden bureaucrats moved on, and Trump, with his business experience and the tech billionaires, who moved from the port side to the starboard side of the chip, and descended on Mir-a-Lago a few weeks ago, would bring some intelligence to the administration in the semiconductor field.

But, a comment by Trump, which stands up there in stupidity like drinking bleach to stop Covid, because during the campaign season ahead of the 2024 presidential election, social media posts repeated a claim. So, it haunted Trump for more than four years, and this comment of tariffs on TSMC is no different.

Why the US needs TSMC?
In addition to my China sanction articles, I’ve written dozens of articles about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC) with stock symbol TSM. My latest article was just four days ago, when on January 25, 2025 I wrote a Substack article entitled “Semiconductor Industry: A Comprehensive 2025 Outlook - Part 1.” Just two weeks earlier, on January 13, 2025 I wrote another Substack article entitled “TSMC's Resilience in Mature Nodes: Debunking the SMIC Price War Narrative.”

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For readers of this article, who don’t have the time or background on TSMC, let me put it bluntly! Without TSMC, there would be no Apple smartphones, no 5G, no data centers, and no AI. Why, because TSMC is the only company in the world that can make chips at the small dimensions that enable the manufacturers of these end products to be competitive.

TSMC continues to dominate the foundry sector, increasing its share in Q3 2024 to 64.9% from 63.8% in Q2 2024, as shown in Table 1. The QoQ increase comes at the expense of market share loss by Samsung Electronics (SSNLF), according to The Information Network’s report Global Semiconductor Equipment: Markets, Market Shares and Market Forecasts.

-- Dr. Robert Castellano, Semiconductor Deep Dive, USA.

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