When Washington slaps import duties on finished semiconductors, the tax doesn't fall on the chip — it falls on the business model. The fabless model, in which a company designs silicon and hands manufacturing to offshore foundries, is built on the assumption that global supply chains are essentially free. Tariffs break that assumption. Every wafer shipped from TSMC's Hsinchu fabs or Samsung's Korean lines into the United States arrives with a levy attached, and that levy lands directly on the income statements of the companies that depend on offshore production: Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and every other fabless name on the S&P 500.
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