The US government passed a legislation, called the Chip and Science Act, in 2022, which found bipartisan support in the Congress, to spend $39 billion in grants to boost manufacturing of semiconductor chips in the US and another $11 billion for research and development in the space.
Trump prefers to use tariffs to bring chip manufacturers into the US, instead of using government subsidies to prop up local industry.
“We don’t want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program Biden has,” Trump told Republican members of Congress in Jan 2025.
On March 4, a Reuters report citing sources said that the Trump administration had fired a third of the staff at the office managing the subsidy programme that allocated billions of dollars to promote the American semiconductor industry. The same day, Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC revealed a plan to invest another $100 billion to build five additional chip manufacturing facilities in the US.
This is a developing story and the article will be updated soon.
First Published: Mar 5, 2025 8:55 AM IST
