US President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser accused China of refusing to engage on trade issues in a Financial Times interview, while a separate report said that Trump believes it will take more time for tariffs to have an effect.
“We gave them a detailed list of asks, regarding technology for example, [which] basically hasn’t changed for five or six months. The problem with the story is that they don’t respond — nothing,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday. “It’s really [Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)] and the Chinese Communist Party — they have to make a decision and so far they have not, or they have made a decision not to do anything, nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The news Web site Axios on Sunday reported that Trump believes it will take more time for tariffs recently imposed by the US on Chinese imports to have an impact on China’s economy, and he believes he will gain more leverage in trade negotiations the longer that they remain in place.
Trump and Xi are expected to meet at next month’s G20 summit in Argentina. Trade talks have been on ice since late September, when the two countries implemented another round of tariffs on each other’s imports.
Kudlow’s comments and the Axios report follow a three-day stretch in which top Chinese officials, including Xi, sought to bolster investor confidence via statements as well as comments reported by state-run media.
The benchmark Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index last week fell to its lowest level in four years as trade tensions and concerns about an economic slowdown weighed on sentiment.
Growth in China decelerated to 6.5 percent in the third quarter, according to data released on Friday last week by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
The Shanghai Composite Index yesterday surged 4.1 percent — the biggest one-day gain since the start of March 2016.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to