White House to target Chinese chips with trade probe, NY Times reports

The White House is planning a trade probe into China’s production of older-model semiconductors, The New York Times’ Ana Swanson reports. According to people familiar with the matter and government and industry documents reviewed by the publication, the investigation could ultimately result in tariffs, import bans or other actions on certain Chinese chips and the products that contain them, though the decision about what course to take would fall to the incoming Trump administration. Swanson writes that the Biden administration has been weighing whether to proceed with a trade investigation under two different laws, one of which is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which focuses on threats to national security and falls to the Commerce Department. The other is option is Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which applies to acts that are “unjustifiable” or “unreasonable” and burden U.S. commerce, and is carried out by the Office of the United States Trade Representative. Publicly traded companies in the space include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel (INTC), Qualcomm (QCOM), NVIDIA (NVDA), Marvel (MRVL), Texas Instruments (TXN), Micron (MU), Microchip (MCHP), and TSMC (TSM).