Former president Donald Trump reiterated his frustration with Taiwan over the weekend when he appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and accused the country of stealing America’s chip industry.
Trump criticized the U.S. CHIPS Act and said he would implement tariffs on chips from Taiwan if elected president. Such tariffs would impact the global leader in chip building, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, whose customers include companies like Nvidia and Apple.
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor closed down 4.3% on Monday.
“You know, Taiwan, they stole our chip business… and they want protection,” Trump said during the appearance. The podcast was published on Saturday evening.
Every hyperscaler, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, working on their own in-house chip is fabbing with the Taiwanese company. UBS analysts estimate over 90 percent of the world’s advanced chips are manufactured by TSMC. Intel and Samsung are among the companies trying to compete but have faced a series of setbacks.
Given the broader geopolitical concerns surrounding Taiwan and the risk of a China invasion, pressure has been growing on U.S. companies to build an alternative to TSMC in the U.S.
Intel, which has emerged as a poster child for the U.S. CHIPS Act, has faced many challenges. “We want to get leading edge infrastructure built here in the U.S., and to be honest, from a policy standpoint, it really shouldn’t matter all that much who is building it,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC.
Rasgon added that the idea that Taiwan had stolen our chips industry was “ridiculous.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is on tap to receive nearly $7 billion from the U.S. Commerce Department to build its Arizona foundry as part of the CHIPS Act. On the company’s earnings call two weeks ago, TSMC CEO CC Wei said its Arizona plant was making progress, with volumes expected to ramp in 2025.
The U.S. Commerce Department funds have yet to be allocated to TSMC or other major semiconductor firms. Sources say funds are expected to be allocated by the end of this year as long as specific milestones are met.
Trump also suggested foreign companies shouldn’t be able to enter the U.S. and use government money. “That chip deal is so bad,” he said. “We put up billions of dollars for rich companies to come in and borrow the money and build chip companies here. They’re not going to give us the good companies anyway.”
Mizuho analysts recently wrote that a Trump win would be bad for Taiwan Semiconductor. Analysts at Citi are debating how much tariffs could increase the costs across the chip supply chain. They add that tariffs wouldn’t be easy for governments to navigate. “[Tariffs] would require complex audits across thousand of devices, which contain a variety of chips,” the Citi analysts wrote.
Markets have been keeping a close eye on the risk surrounding Taiwan, given how dependent Silicon Valley is on TSMC’s chips. Earlier this summer, when Trump made similar comments about Taiwan, the SMH ETF lost $675 billion in market cap in one week. TSMC fell over 10%.
U.S. companies that either have fabs or are in the process of building them, like Intel, Global Foundries and Texas Instruments, outperformed on the expectation that if Trump wins, he’ll favor the domestic players.
However, a broader trade war could also challenge the sector. “[Under a Trump presidency], there are potentially big tariffs against China, which, as we have seen before, will elicit a China reaction as we saw with Micron,” said Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy and a top-ranked tech analyst said to CNBC.
But experts warn that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election, it’s not an “all clear” for the semi trade. Some of the harshest export controls on China implemented under the Biden administration dramatically impacted how much Nvidia and other semiconductors can sell into the country. Pre-export controls, Nvidia’s business in China generated over 25 percent of total sales. China now accounts for less than 10% of Nvidia’s revenue.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.