Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race US tariffs - should they go ahead - are likely to result in price bumps for essential components and construction materials in the datacenter industry, and may even cost America its lead in the AI race as investments are paused or canceled. A report from ABI Research, Navigating Tariff Turbulence in the Technology Sector, …
Except you are losing all other races too.
The AI Race is just a very visible "competition". But everything else in computers, or technology in general, is just as much affected.
There are not many international "competitions" where MAGA is not kneecapping the USA.
is to build new data centres outside of the USA. If components are not imported they will not be taxed.
Corporations can still operate them - there is not a tariff on data entering the USA (well, so far at least).
I am certain that Canada & Mexico will be happy to grant permits to build them even happier to have factories to assemble servers - which is now done in the USA.
Is this what Trump intended ?
When we were only shipping bales of cotton, casks of rum, and crates of tea around, it was fairly straightforward to count how many things were being unloaded from the ship.
What about when the thing we're importing is knowledge and IP?
Maybe I should just ask ChatGPT...
They get grouped as "services" and as long as the US administration is able to grasp more than one concept at a time you consider trade to be goods and services and discover your trade balance is close enough to balanced to avoid trade wars that will ultimately cost the country much more.
Admittedly, being rational makes the creation of very simple narratives to control a poorly elected electorate much harder.
Unilateral imposition of tariffs has sent a rather negative message to our trading partners (that is, everyone else). It says that we're fundamentally self centered, we're unreliable and we don't mind chucking our weight about. For many this is just something they've had to live with, if they don't like what we do then they don't have a choice, they have to suck it up. But if there's an alternative then they're likely to take it and, unfortunately, China is that alternative. Obviously we've cultivated the notion that China is some inherently hostile Bad Guy and that we allies need to band together to hold it back but this kind of notion is paper thin, its likely to evaporate at a moment's notice. Put simply, all China has to do to 'win' is to just be a normal country with normal bilateral trading relations who treat others with respect. It shouldn't be too hard, but its obviously something we need to work on.
As for the money, its us, "We, the (Long Suffering) People" who are going to get hit.
From my point of view it's unfortunate because driving trade to China empowers an authoritarian regime with an appalling record on human rights.
China might be a useful counterweight to the USA's current madness, but that doesn't mean that they're suddenly the good guys.
[...] the Democratic People’s Republic of America before summer.
No, the Democratic party will have noting to do with that. It will be the Republican Republic of Amerika. Or perhaps they will figure out some clumsy way to work "MAGA" into the name somehow.
Or, as stated above, tRump will have to be in there somewhere...
One authoritarian regime with an appalling record on human rights vs another authoritarian regime with an appalling record on human rights.
Personally I'll take the one with thousands of years of history, invention and civilisation.
For American readers, that would be China.
Seems to me that recent treatment of human rights in us are pretty horrific. Being kidnapped of the street by thugs wearing masks sounds like something from a horror movie. orange peanut is probably envious of kent state. haven't reached that point, but it certainly feels like that is around the cornet.
Irony of ironies is that in the 1980s American corporations created what became modern day China*, thinking they would control it and then lost control and are now super pissed about.
But it's now too late. That horse is NEVER, EVER coming back to the barn.
(it's a complicated story involving screwing Japan and screwing American labor simultaneously while goosing stock prices.)
First, do people agree with tariffs in general? Because the US was not a high tariff country compared to the rest of the world. Second, why aren't people complaining about other countries? China has traditionally made it near impossible to export to them unless it was some trivial luxury item of little value economically or something they cannot make themselves yet, e.g., Nvidia high end chips. The EU has played rough with poor countries for example the fair trade game where they make sure the processing is done within the EU raher than letting the poor countries build proper economies. Look at France's behaviour over Uranium.
Also, I suspect that the US is negotiating a better deal and those that have not taken spiteful revenge approaches will get a fair deal. There is also information that China is really hurting economically and isn't in as strong a position as they pretend to be. But in China you don't get to complain, criticise or oppose the government, that is dealt with pretty swiftly as Jack Ma found out. The less prominent fare worse.
Successful countries that have low labour costs will drive down labour costs all over. You have 2 choices; either try and push and support them to become open democracies so that their labour costs increase and a balance is reached or keep them supressed and use them. The US built modern China trying to do it the first way. It helped that some Americans could skim off that of course. But, it failed and they just created a challenger to their world hegemony. Then they had Russia actually becoming more democratic and re-emerging as a potential competitor so they are trying to wack that mole down which is backfiring too. Trump has sensibly realised that he would do better getting between Russia and China rather than fighting both. So at least someone has learnt what happened to Germany with 2 major fronts!
It's not the concept of tariffs that's bad. That's a stupid claim that Trumpsters like to try to put in their critics' mouths; a strawman.
The problem is wide-area tariffs that have no specific purpose, and unpredictably shifting tariffs. The first just plain don't work except to depress everyone's economy; this has been seen in practice enough times and really shouldn't need another experiment to prove it. The second fail at shaping companies' behavior, because they can't plan to accomodate them; I'm not going to commit to a decade-long investment based on tariffs that might not be there next month. Trump has managed to do both at the same time.
If Trump had implemented targeted tariffs with a declared purpose and stuck to them, there would be far less to criticize. Most countries do some of that, here and there.
America was attacked and invaded by multiple enemies of the state from multiple directions all at the same time. We were ambushed. At the moment the best plan of action is to let the executioners hang themselves. They will hang themselves before they ever remove their executioners mask. They will never show their true faces, and America can use that to their advantage in the short term. The people are waiting for enough of the population to get on the same page, and the foreign Emperor is keeping busy trying to stop that from happening.
1/3 of America voted for it. 1/3 voted otherwise, which means trump won by about 1-2% of the popular vote. 1/3 decided they wouldn't vote.
The ones that did turn out were victims of social engineering because they didn't know better. ignorance and stupidity are two different things. As an example, 56% of women voters voted trump. That's a lot of people voting against themselves, why? because of social engineering. We made social media a central part of our voting process without educating the user about what was actually happening to them. If we said outright... hey you are being manipulated by social engineering by very bad people with bad intent (a lot of russians)... it's not real, and we did, we got the push back from the very influencers making their living off influencing others. Social media was a trap. Still, people refuse to believe they let themselves get conned, and that social media is "no big deal", and that they don't believe it. They won't until everything is burned to a fine ash in a hellfire. America will have to rebuild with its hard lessons. Hopefully, with a stronger Europe.
Freeze, better still, minimise US investment and expand outside the US. Beyond the taxiff walls you can function fine, buying, selling, even building data centres if you want.
With regard to AI, the built-in obsolescence of the hardware, time taken to get functioning and lack of consumer desire to pay extra, means that AI data centres are money pits from day 1. There is no business case, even without the taxiffs, so the less you spend, the less you lose.
Trump will eventually go after a period of national self-harm. If the US economy is still functioning and the taxiffs go, it may be worth operating in the US again. Until then, instead of just outsourcing manufacture or assembly, outsource most or all of your business operations beyond US taxiff borders. You can't run a business in a circus.
Americans realize they are assisting the effort to unite Europe and that their actions are assisting the demise of America. Most support it rn. America knows it will have to pay a price for allowing this to happen. America is willing to pay the price. Many are even hoping for a major financial reset. There will be a heavy price to pay. The only course of action is to help Europe become stronger. We will need Europe to help us recover, and insure stability against America's enemies. Americans are helping the foreign emperor achieve his destructive goals in an effort to show the world it's mistakes. Americans are going to suffer one way or another at this point.
From the article:
A report from ABI Research, Navigating Tariff Turbulence in the Technology Sector, warns that the effects of Trump's import taxes go beyond just hiking prices, with the unpredictability reshaping the tech sector as organizations reassess their entire supply chains and reconsider investment decisions.
Uh-Oh! ABI's gonna get in trouble! Nyah, nyah, nyuh-NYAAAAH, nyah!
Expect YAN unconstitutional, brain-dead, pouty Executive Order† in Three...Two...One......
†Or is that Executive Odor?
(That's Artificial General Intelligence)
https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w
Some guys looked at Claude 3.5 Haiku by Anthropic and did "circuit analysis".
They figure they have proven that not only are LLMs "not conscious", they never will be.
All it does is match letters, number patterns, and eventually pick a plausible next word to utter.
Even if you ask it "explain your reasoning," it comes up with a plausible reasoning, but it never did that reasoning. If it says that's how it figured out the answer, well the LLM is lying again.
Yeah its all here,
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html
