The AI industry doesn’t know if Trump just killed its GPU supply

AI companies can’t figure out if the Trump tariffs are about to decimate them – and the fact that no one has a clear answer is sending them, and the tech industry overall, into a confusion spiral. 

The markets are in disarray. Nvidia is down 7.59%, TSMC is down 7.22%. In San Francisco, sources tell us that this isn’t a big deal. But in DC, people are panicking. The core question is whether GPUs – the graphics processing units that are crucial to AI computing and other industries – are exempted from Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, and the answer is startlingly ambiguous. 

Inside AI labs, researchers expect that their industry will be granted a tariff exemption. “I fully expect this to be a situation where Trump again gives companies he views as important/on his side/whatever a hall pass,” similar to what the President did with Apple during his first term, one source inside a major AI lab told The Verge. 

In Washington, however, nobody seems sure what the current state of play is. The Trump administration spelled out an exception for the semiconductor chips at the heart of a GPU, but for now, complete electronic products that contain chips will apparently be subje …

Read the full story at The Verge.