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Taiwan’s president has pledged to spice up procurement and funding within the US as he rushes to reply to Donald Trump’s world tariff threats and stress on Taiwan’s semiconductor trade.
“We will increase investment in the US and purchases from it to balance bilateral trade,” Lai Ching-te instructed reporters on Friday, simply hours after the US president introduced plans to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on international locations with which the US runs giant commerce deficits.
The US commerce deficit with Taiwan, its seventh-largest buying and selling companion, widened by $26.1bn to $73.9bn final 12 months, pushed by booming demand for cutting-edge synthetic intelligence chips. Most are made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm, the world’s largest chipmaker.
However Lai asserted Taiwan’s main function in world chip manufacturing and pushed again in opposition to Trump’s calls for that semiconductor enterprise — which the US president has accused Taiwan of “stealing” — be returned to America.
“I want to emphasise that as the world’s most potent semiconductor [manufacturing] power, Taiwan is capable and willing to respond to new situations,” stated Lai.
He vowed to “ensure Taiwan’s indispensability in the global supply chain” and proposed a “global semiconductor democratic supply chain initiative” as a way to assist the US construct extra resilient provide chains — a co-operative imaginative and prescient distinct from Trump’s protectionist push to pay attention the trade at residence.
Following stress from the primary Trump and Biden administrations in addition to its US prospects, TSMC has dedicated to investing $65bn in three fabrication crops in Arizona, the primary of which is already in mass manufacturing. Though the crops will nonetheless account for lower than a fifth of TSMC’s whole capability when accomplished, they’re the corporate’s largest abroad funding.
However Trump has threatened to overturn subsidy offers granted below his predecessor, a transfer that would put greater than $6bn of monetary assist for TSMC in danger. Trump additionally needs to rebuild chip manufacturing within the US at a a lot bigger scale.
When asserting his newest tariff plans on Thursday, Trump repeated accusations that Taiwan “took our chip business away”.
“We want that business back in the United States,” he stated, “and if they don’t bring it back, we’re not going to be very happy.”
Lai on Friday affirmed that Taipei was the US’s “most reliable trading partner” and invoked the international locations’ shared democratic values.
However he stated the Trump administration was pursuing “strategies and policies that are completely different from the past”, including that this posed challenges for all different international locations, together with Taiwan.
