Trump has caused something comical: chip manufacturers are racing to collect subsidies before he reaches the White House

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will once again be president of the United States. As we told you yesterday, during his presidential campaign he has fiercely criticized on several occasions the ‘Chips and Science Act’ program approved by the Administration led by Joe Biden in July 2022. This plan allocates no less than 52 billion dollars specifically to companies that are dedicated to the design or manufacturing of integrated circuits.

Trump has said that the ‘CHIPS’ program is so bad that if he won the election he would use tariffs instead to force companies to manufacture semiconductors in the US. He last made this argument in October, in the joe rogan podcast: “We put millions of dollars on the table for rich companies to come in, borrow the money, and build chip companies here. And they’re not going to give us the best companies anyway.”

Now is the time for chipmakers to run if they want to cash in

At this time only one semiconductor manufacturer has received its fair share of money from the ‘Chips and Science Act’ program: Polar Semiconductors. This American company has received 123 million dollars in subsidies, but the others continue to wait, among other reasons, because they have not yet fully completed the procedures they must do for the US Administration to evaluate their candidacy and give them the money. .

At this juncture, the arrival of Donald Trump to the Government casts enormous uncertainty on the US semiconductor industry in general, and on foreign chip companies in particular. In fact, TSMC and Samsung’s expansion strategy in the US could be altered if Trump’s arrival in the White House prevented them from receiving the funds from the ‘CHIPS’ program to which they aspire.

This has caused some of these companies to suddenly be forced to hurry as much as possible to finalize their applications in order to collect the grant money before the next US president arrives at the White House.

TSMC and GlobalFoundries are two of the companies that have just concluded their agreement with the US Government. The money they will receive will be used to build new chip manufacturing plants in the US, or to expand existing facilities. TSMC will receive 6.6 billion dollars in subsidies and up to 5,000 million in loans to prepare its new plants in Phoenix (Arizona).

And GlobalFoundries will receive $1.5 billion in grants and up to $1.6 billion in loans to build a new integrated circuit factory in New York and expand its Vermont facility. In addition, it will receive 600 million from the State of New York. It is paradoxical that these and other semiconductor companies have been in a hurry at the last minute, when they have verified that Donald Trump has won the elections. This possibility has been on the table for a long time and its criticisms of the ‘CHIPS’ program are well known.

Image | MattWade

rmation | Bloomberg

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