Taiwan’s President has pledged to increase investments and purchases in the US in response to Donald Trump’s global tariff threats and pressure on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.
“As we will increase investments in the US and purchases there to balance bilateral trade” Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te said to reporters on Friday, just hours after the US President announced plans to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on countries with significant trade deficits.
The US trade deficit with Taiwan, its seventh-largest trading partner, has expanded by $26.1 billion to $73.9 billion in the past year, largely due to the booming demand for high-end chips for artificial intelligence, mostly produced by the world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
However, Lai reaffirmed Taiwan’s leading role in global chip production and rejected Trump’s demand to bring the Taiwanese semiconductor industry back to the US, which the US President had accused of “theft”.
“I would like to emphasize that Taiwan, as the world’s strongest chip power, is capable and ready to respond to new situations” Lai said.
He promised to “ensure Taiwan’s irreplaceability in the global supply chain” and proposed a “global democratic chip supply chain initiative” to help the US build more resilient supply chains – a cooperative vision that differs from Trump’s protectionist efforts to concentrate the industry in the US.
When announcing his latest tariff plans on Thursday, Trump repeated the accusation that Taiwan had “stolen the chip business” from the US.
“We want this business back in the United States” he said. “And if they don’t bring it back, we won’t be very happy about it.”
Lai reaffirmed on Friday that Taipei is the “most reliable trading partner” of the US and cited the shared democratic values of the two countries.