During President Trump’s first address to the joint session of Congress since taking office in January 2025, he said to the present senators and representatives, “You should get rid of the CHIPS Act, and whatever is left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it reduce debt or any other reason you want to.” He also said during the televised speech that the CHIPS Act was a “horrible, horrible thing” and that the US has given “hundreds of billions of dollars, and it doesn’t mean a thing; they take our money, and they don’t spend it.”
The CHIPS and Science Act was a bipartisan bill approved during President Joe Biden’s term, and it allocated $52 billion in subsidies to companies, with Intel getting the largest award at nearly $7.9 billion. The total funding includes an additional $75 billion in low-interest loans. Other companies to get allocation from the federal government include TSMC, Micron, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and GlobalFoundries. The total awarded amount has reached $33 billion — meaning these are signed contracts that the government would likely have difficulty backing out of — and the Biden administration finalized the disbursements before it left office.
However, these subsidies aren’t cash payments that will be deposited in a company’s account immediately after receiving notice of the award. Instead, they are paid in tranches once an awardee has hit certain milestones. This is why Intel was frustrated with the delay in CHIPS Act payments, as it only received a total of $2.2 billion of the planned $7.86 billion as of January 2025.
There were rumors that Donald Trump opposed the subsidies his predecessor championed even while he was on the campaign trail. However, these weren’t substantiated then. Now that Trump is back in the White House, he prefers to impose tariffs instead of spending money to encourage chipmakers to build their semiconductor factories within the U.S.
Just hours before his speech, the U.S. imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico. Trump also doubled the tariff rate placed on Chinese goods to 20%. This is why he’s pointing out that many companies announced investments within the country during the first few months of his presidency. According to Trump, a total of $1.7 trillion in semiconductor spending was announced since he came into power, citing figures from SoftBank ($200 billion), OpenAI and Oracle ($500 billion), Apple ($500 billion), and TSMC ($165 billion). We should note, though, that TSMC has already invested $65 billion in its Arizona fab and that it’s adding $100 billion more to expand it.
The tariffs that the White House is putting on goods — especially those coming from China, where many electronics and computer hardware come from — have likely spurred big companies to start moving their manufacturing operations into the U.S. Smaller companies like ASRock are also slowly moving out of China to avoid the worst of the tariffs. It will take time to move and set up manufacturing bases and supply chains, though, especially for things as complicated as chips. So, it's possible that the average consumer could have to deal with increasing prices while we wait for the factories within our borders to start churning out the chips, computer parts, and other electronic equipment we buy.
