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 T ... Read full article.