Fascinating. I suppose they can be smaller than quartz crystals?

No company can plan based on the tariffs. There is zero guarantee that then next government won't revoked them or that the current one won't flip-flop. Local manufacturing doesn't swing on a 2-4 (or 6 or 8) year timescale. There needs to be consistency.

The company that moves (or starts) manufacturing here today might get run out of business when/if tariffs are repealed and their competitor already has production lines in other countries ready to go. Heck, the factory might not even open before the winds shift.

No one can accurately plan with the uncertainty.

All the big names like Apple are just paying lip service to this. They are throwing, quite literally, pocket change or funds from the government (like CHIPS, which was less ham-fisted than the tariffs IMHO but still not something that's going to change the landscape overnight) at these endeavours to appease the current admin in favor of reduced/removed tariffs on _their_ products and good PR.

If congress wanted to actually do their jobs instead of both them and the judiciary abdicating their responsibility to the executive branch then _maybe_ we'd have a chance in hell. Until then you can look forward to more flip-flopping as the government changes and the smaller companies continuing to be ground under the heel of large corporations who can weather (or bribe) their way out of the tariffs.

The tariffs have been highly destructive to local manufacturing because in the US we mostly build complex things made out of simpler parts which we import. The cost of everything we build simply increased and as a result many businesses selling relatively higher margin, higher complexity products had to scale back or shut down.

More to the point, the notion that dollars leaving the country is a real problem is really a kind of primitive understanding of money. Dollars are something we control. If dollars leave the country, that means there is demand for dollars. We control the supply of dollars. We literally can’t lose, so long as people are still using the USD, which they’re less inclined to when we’re tariffing their exports.

Putting aside the lack of evidence that tariffs meaningfully reduced the US trade deficit as other posts here remarked, reduction of the deficit would be catastrophic for the USD based global financial system anyway so it's bad for the US and bad for the world.

Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.

The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and 'give away' these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.

If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it'd first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as 'hard money that everyone accepts'. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR/CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods 'for free' in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.

It's adding a huge amount of economic turmoil, businesses are not investing because there's no certainty, and there's no more "local investment" except in newspaper articles.

The tariffs haven't made any difference in the trade deficit. There was a large peak just before the tariffs went into effect but since then the deficit has been largely the same as it was before the tariffs.

https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-trade-goods-a...

The biggest problem with the tariff policy is not the cost or even the uncertainty, it's the corruption. A single person should not have the power to dictate the terms of trade, because the rational play in such a system is for businesses that rely on trade to pander to that person, and that's corrupt.

This is more about the CHIPS act than the tariffs.

Tariffs are in every way inferior to the prior administration's CHIPS act and IRA, which are in the process of being destroyed merely because they had bipartisan support.

> they do seem to be causing fewer dollars to leave the country in imports

Have you accounted for the dollars that are no longer re-entering the country due to boycotts or retaliatory trade policies?

We are losing a lot more manufacturing due to the new tariffs on industrial parts than we are gaining from tariffs on finished products

If it had been done with coordinated investment/lending from the government to spur domestic production it’d be a very good move. The economy is stalling (outside of tech) because there is no money for increased production domestically.

Chips are specifically excluded from the tarrifs.

For some recent data, see the diagram "Semiconductor foundry capacity 8" & 12" - by foundry location (in %)" at [1] for a rough idea of kWpm (thousand 300mm equivalent wafer starts per month) for key countries/regions for 2024, 2025 and prediction for 2031. China and ROK are predicted in this report to have the largest overall market share increases to 2031.

For some more detailed data (hard to find it publicly available), also see the OECD report at [2], particularly pages 18 and 20 (as numbered). This report provides a breakdown of ~2024-2025 per-country/per-region capacity by chip type (power, analog, speciality memory, commodity memory, advanced logic, mature logic) and a prediction for pre-country/per-region upcoming capacity increases by chip type.

There are markets within markets of course. China dominates in power electronics which makes senses when you consider even just their domestic demand for electric vehicles and renewable generators. Taiwan dominates in advanced logic and exports pretty much all of it. ROK dominates in commodity memory and also exports pretty much all of it. When you compare populations of China vs. USA, the USA are/will be punching above their weight for analog and advanced logic chips, which is also where the focus of their investment is.

In categories such as power electronics and mature logic which China dominates, labour cost is much more important than categories such as advanced logic where equipment is the overwhelming cost. For this reason you'll find China (and maybe even India if they bother to get into the market) dominate these categories due to lower costs of labour. Traditional competitors in these categories such as Onsemi and STMicroelectronics have been hurting.[3]

It's hard to predict which announced/planned investments will go ahead and be impactful, for various reasons such as utilisation rates of fabs once built. But it'll be particularly and increasingly difficult to predict the future of semiconductor fabrication due to what is happening in China. China has expanded their domestic chip making equipment industry enough to mandate Chinese fabs use at least 50% Chinese equipment.[4] Over 2024 and 2025 the investment from China into chip making equipment was estimated to be 37-42% of global spend, so we're talking about 20% (or maybe higher up to 40%) of global chip making equipment spending not being readily observable.[5]

[1] https://www.yolegroup.com/product/report/status-of-the-semic...

[2] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

[3] https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/02/26/news-power-chipma...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-mandates-50-domest...

[5] https://www.semi.org/en/SEMI-Reports-Global-Semiconductor-Eq...

> causing fewer dollars to leave the country

Might cause fewer dollars to enter the country too. Closed doors block both directions. Other countries are watching and responding in kind. Maybe not that much at first out of fear of retaliation but builds up momentum.

The tariffs have done nothing to improve the budget deficit (not even worth mentioning the debt) and consumer prices are higher than ever. We’ve seen no benefits.

No.

Please provide sources for your feelings, as the facts all seem to indicate that the deficit is rising. As well as inflation. And the national debt.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade

None of his promises ever come to fruition. Stop hoping.

$30 billion for “hundreds of jobs.”

Theater to keep Mad King Trump off their back.

This is about Taiwan, not tariffs.

I figure supply chain migration is an incremental process and any progress is a win. In my mind some of the tech needs genuinely experienced staff and that must be seeded somehow.

Note I am talking out of my ass but this is how I see the picture. I have no experience in supply chain or manufacturing :)

Probably to highlight us investment and get authorization for buying Chinese memory

Marketing departments everywhere have been letting internal corpspeak just leak out lately. OAI's announcement shutting down Sora was similar:

> To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you

"built community"?

Increase the increase ?

I mean its the same thing as the data center investments.

Think whatever you want about them, whether they're good or bad when it comes to environment, public health etc.

But one thing cannot be ignored - that they are not built to employ some large swath of people. They can be run with very lean teams, much leaner than the average person thinks for something so large. Any claim that they are employing some measurable amount of people is a sham they try to push onto the public.

Downvoted for stating the obvious lmao

This sounds like specialized analog components. Not the modem.

The modems are made by _Qual_comm, not Broadcom.

Different company.

> https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/336478/is-it-rea...

I've mainly seen it used this way in business contexts

The same reason it's "ask" and not "request"

spend is a noun in this sentence. As a noun, spend refers to the amount of money spent for a particular purpose or over a specified length of time

In English (is it worse in American English?) we frequently convert gerunds into simpler forms of the word. The spending turns into the spend. Related,the request turns into the ask (although this example turns out to have a strong anglo saxon linguistic bias).

Because as it’s written it specifically indicates it’s a financial move: give Broadcom more money for more chips.

As you wrote it, it could be an IP partnership, Apple opening a fab, or something else.

It's much more specific. "Spend" would increase Broadcom's revenue. "Partners with" might be anything: investment, R&D assistance, whatever.

Both are public companies so they might be required to reveal these details

It's gramatically correct, spend is a noun here (but you expected a verb).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spend#Noun

"spend" as a noun is a linguistic differentiator to indicate what a badass MBA program you attended.

It sounds off because “increase” can be a verb or a noun and “spend” can also be used as a verb or a noun (but is more often used as a verb) so you’re brain is trying to parse the sentence with dual meaning terms

It sounds better on the quarterly report than "Apple will pay more money"

Your proposed sentence contains less information.

The initial headline also conveys both that there is current spend with Broadcom, and that the future spend is higher than current levels.

I hear this frequently in the US business community, as an alternative to "spending".

Help pump AVGO by tipping sentiment and creating a visualization of billions getting dumped into Broadcom.

I think it just means they had been partnering in the past and now they're expanding it with more investment.

That's an ask for Apple, not us ;)