What the US semiconductor tariff does and does not currently touch
The 25% tariff the United States imposed on advanced semiconductors in January comes with a carve-out that has kept it from touching the AI buildout, exempting covered products destined for American data centres.
That exemption was always provisional, and the Commerce Department report that determines whether it survives was due on 1 July, in a policy environment that has already produced a draft ban on Chinese equipment in data centres.
The report has not been published. Until it is, every operator planning American capacity is working from an assumption rather than a settled rule.
The tariff itself is narrower than the headline rate suggests. It applies to three tariff subheadings covering data processing machines and their parts, and only to logic integrated circuits within specific performance and memory bandwidth bands, which is a deliberately surgical way of hitting AI accelerators without catching laptops.
Seven end-use exceptions sit alongside it,...
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