President Donald Trump will introduce new tariffs specifically on chips and semiconductors as early as next week. He announced this on CNBC's Squawk Box show yesterday. Details of these tariffs have not yet been announced but they are likely to be imposed to force global semiconductor companies to build chips in the United States.
Several semiconductor companies such as TSMC, Samsung and Intel have already built factories in the United States under the CHIPS Act launched by President Biden. The negative impact on the semiconductor sector will occur if high tariffs are imposed by Trump.
A few days ago, MITI Minister Tengku Zafrul touched on Malaysia being under US surveillance following an incident involving local semiconductors being exported to Russia and NVIDIA GPUs being smuggled to China via Johor. As a measure to prevent this from happening again, MITI now requires permits for the export, transfer and transit of high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) chips originating from the United States.