US President Donald Trump was to meet Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (劉鶴) at the White House yesterday as speculation grows that negotiations over a trade deal between the world’s biggest economies is entering the final stages.
Talks are continuing in Washington where Liu held meetings with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday.
The goal is to strike an agreement on the core issues so Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) can sign a deal.
Drafts of an agreement to end a nearly year-long trade dispute would give Beijing until 2025 to meet commitments on commodity purchases and allow US companies to wholly own enterprises in the Asian nation, three people familiar with the talks said.
As the talks resumed on Wednesday morning, US National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow touted progress, but said that a final deal to end the trade dispute remained elusive.
Negotiators are “making good headway, but we’re not there and we hope this week to get closer,” Kudlow told reporters at an event in Washington.
While White House officials have expressed cautious optimism in recent days about securing a deal in the near future, a tentative US decision to sell fighter jets to Taiwan might affect the outcome of this week’s talks as well as any Trump-Xi summit, one of the people said.
Given the geopolitical sensitivities of such a sale, that issue would likely be raised only when the two leaders meet and is unlikely to be part of the trade negotiations led by Lighthizer.
Under the proposed trade agreement, China would commit by 2025 to buy more US commodities, including soybeans and energy products, and allow 100 percent foreign ownership for US companies operating in China as a binding pledge that can trigger retaliation if left unfulfilled, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.
Other non-binding promises China has offered to implement by 2029 would not be tied to potential US retaliation, they said, without elaborating.
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