U.S. government plans tariff exemptions for TSMC, if it follows through on American investment
But if that’s still the goal, the current US policy is doing a strange job of achieving it. Washington seems to want the benefits of control without the administrative state required to exercise it.
Alexander Capri, senior lecturer in the business school at the National University of Singapore believes the U.S. is aiming for containment as well as platform capture. The logic, he said, is that restricting sales too tightly risks “kneecapping American companies” just as Chinese firms are catching up.
That means that rather than trying to deny everyone access, the US is trying to make itself indispensable. “It’s now about building dependence and reliance on America, on the American tech stack,” Capri said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium . The result is more overseas partnerships, more Gulf investment, and more American cloud and chip infrastructure abroad, with the corollary that more countries are tied into a U.S.-led AI ecosystem by commercial necessity.
At the moment, that’s true. American AI chip suppliers retain enormous leverage. “The alternative to US AI chips is not Chinese AI chips,” said McGuire. “It’s no AI chips.” Nvidia, for instance, has an 81% market share by revenue for chips destined for data centers, according to IDC. That power means the US can shape the market, decide which partners get access, and compel companies and countries to build their AI stacks inside an American-designed architecture.
The problem is that leverage only works if it is used coherently. Right now, there’s confusion over what the U.S. is aiming for. Wolf said existing flows appear broadly normal, and for companies already shipping or already operating data centers, business is largely continuing. “The uncertainty is making plans in the future,” said Wolf. “Do we build this data in country X?” he explained. Companies might decide to do so, then find in a month, a week or a year that it’s suddenly embargoed under a Trump administration decision. “No one knows,” he said.
Because of that, some businesses are holding back investment altogether, reluctant to pour billions into overseas capacity that might be trapped by a future rule. But others are doing the opposite, racing ahead to try to make money before Washington changes its mind again. In Southeast Asia, this has produced a mixture of hesitation and acceleration, while also allowing the area to gain more than $55 billion of investment in 2025.
But countries that thought they might become neutral hosts for AI infrastructure have found themselves caught in a geopolitical storm they can’t control. Malaysia and Thailand are attractive because they welcome investment while sitting outside the U.S.’s China embargo. However, it becomes trickier because they can be attractive for the same reason to bad actors looking to route chips somewhere less visible.
McGuire pointed to recent smuggling cases — including the one involving former Super Micro executives (the company itself denies any wrongdoing, and is cooperating with the investigation) — as evidence that is more than a theoretical risk. “This third country diversion problem is real and it’s big,” he said. “The industry is not policing itself right now.”
For now, Washington can still rely on the brute fact that the rest of the world still needs American chips. But that window won’t stay open indefinitely, and several of the people watching this closest think the sheer strategic importance of AI will eventually force the White House to stop improvising.
“I think they’re going to have to, because the tech is going to force their hand,” McGuire said. The idea that advanced AI chips can “flow to most countries in the world without the US government having any visibility or insight,” he argued, will soon “seem preposterous.”
Until then, though, the vacuum is itself becoming policy. Wolf said what’s most striking is the absence of the normal Washington machinery around rulemaking. “There are no speeches, there’s no government outreach, there’s no conferences,” he said.
That means there’s no settled doctrine to decode, or no obvious coalition pushing one approach over another, which means there’s no real confidence that anyone inside the administration has fully decided what comes next. For allies, investors and countries trying to build AI capacity without becoming collateral damage, that’s the real lesson of Trump’s chip policy: No one's steering the most important supply chain in tech.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a Tom's Hardware contributor who focuses on the tech sector and its impact on our daily lives\u2014online and offline.\u00a0He is the author of How AI Ate the World, published in 2024, as well as TikTok Boom, YouTubers, and The History of the Internet in Byte-Sized Chunks. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-19/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Chris Stokel-Walker Freelance Contributor Chris Stokel-Walker is a Tom's Hardware contributor who focuses on the tech sector and its impact on our daily lives—online and offline. He is the author of How AI Ate the World, published in 2024, as well as TikTok Boom, YouTubers, and The History of the Internet in Byte-Sized Chunks.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/americas-ai-chip-rules-keep-changing-and-the-rest-of-the-world-is-paying-the-price#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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