AI industry says Trump plans to tax chips in the “single dumbest way imaginable”

Donald Trump may be gearing up to announce a broad new round of semiconductor tariffs, and the tech industry thinks the timing could hardly be worse. A report in Politico says the duties could arrive in the coming weeks or months, which has sparked fresh panic inside the AI world.

The fear is not just about chips themselves. People familiar with the administration’s thinking, speaking anonymously, say one version under discussion would stretch the tariff net far beyond semiconductors and pull in products made with them, including gaming consoles and the servers packed into data centers.

That is the part that has the industry shouting. A tariff that touches the components and then the finished gear built around them would hit a lot more than a narrow supply chain. It would reach deep into the hardware stack that AI depends on.

The source does not say the plan is final. It does say the framework is still being worked out, which is exactly why the alarm is so loud: nobody in tech likes the idea of tariff policy being improvised onto one of the most fragile parts of the modern economy.