Information Technology · Sunday, 30 August 2026
Washington's chip tax excused nearly every buyer. Now it may reach laptops and game consoles.
A second round of US chip tariffs is being drafted, eight people told Politico. It would tax the machines chips go into, and January's exemptions for data centres, research, startups and consumer devices may not carry over.
25%
the chip tariff set in January
with data centres, research, startups and consumer devices excused
8
unnamed people describing the new plan
the whole report rests on them, and Reuters could not confirm it
2029
when SK Hynix's Indiana plant starts full production
about a year later than the company first planned
62.6%
forecast rise in South Korean exports in August
a 15th straight month of growth, driven by AI memory chips
The lead story — what happened
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The Trump administration is weighing a second round of tariffs on chips, eight people told Politico on Thursday.
[1] [2] -
This round would tax the machines chips go into as well: laptops, game consoles and the servers that fill data centres.
[1] [2] [3] -
January's tariff on imported chips was 25%. It came with exemptions covering data centres, research, startups and consumer devices.
[3] -
Commerce officials have said in private talks that those exemptions may not carry over. That is the real change on the table.
[3] -
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick favours capping duty-free chip imports at a volume tied to what each company has promised to build in America.
[1] [3] -
Reuters could not confirm the report. The White House and the Commerce Department did not answer requests for comment.
[1] -
A separate rule is being drafted to stop Chinese firms renting American AI chips through servers in Thailand and Singapore.
[4] -
The factories all this is meant to reward are years away. SK Hynix broke ground in Indiana this week and starts volume production in 2029.
[6] [7] -
Chips are the one thing still selling hard. South Korean exports are forecast to have risen 62.6% in August, a 15th straight monthly gain.
[8] -
China is applying its own pressure quietly, slowing germanium and quartz shipments to Taiwan through customs checks rather than a ban.
[5]
What is pushing on this
relief from the tariff would be tied to what each firm promises to build here
a separate rule is being drafted to stop Chinese firms renting US chips from Thailand and Singapore
the new round would cover laptops and game consoles, which ordinary people buy
South Korean exports forecast up 62.6% in August on AI memory
Who is involved
How it unfolded
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January
a 25% tariff on imported chips, with four groups excused
[3] -
May
the US Trade Representative says no new chip tariffs are imminent
[1] -
Thursday
Politico reports a second round covering laptops, consoles and servers
[1] [2] [3] -
Friday
a separate rule surfaces, aimed at renting chips from abroad
[4] -
September
Commerce may share the remote-access rule with trade groups
[4]
Where this points
Watch the exemption list rather than the rate. If January's carve-outs for data centres and startups are dropped, the same headline number becomes a far bigger tax.
The rest of the day
24 more stories on this beat.
Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.
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02
Rule drafted on renting chips from abroad
The Commerce Department is working on a rule to stop Chinese firms using American AI chips remotely, through servers in Thailand and Singapore. It could go to trade groups in September.
[4] Why it matters — US controls cover chips that physically move. Renting the machine from a distance has never been covered.
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03
Tencent gives away a large new model
Tencent released a preview of Hy4, a free-to-download model aimed at coding, research and financial work. It holds 770 billion parameters and uses about 49 billion on any one request.
[13] Why it matters — A model anyone can download runs wherever chips are, which is the one place a wall around chips cannot reach.
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04
Z.ai names itself behind Ox Alpha
The Beijing lab Z.ai confirmed it built Ox Alpha, a coding and reasoning model, and published its weights on Wednesday. It argued that China's open approach is safer than Silicon Valley's closed one.
[14] [15] Why it matters — Weights are the learned numbers inside a model. Publish them and nobody needs permission to use it.
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05
Money pours into give-it-away AI
Nvidia struck a $6bn deal with open-weight builder Poolside, and Stripe bought OpenRouter for more than $7bn two weeks ago. Nvidia is also tuning its hardware for DeepSeek and Alibaba models.
[16] [17] Why it matters — Nvidia warned in a filing that Washington may restrict Chinese-built AI, and is investing in it anyway.
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06
8.7m airport customers' details taken
Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports said hackers reached data on about 8.7 million customers, mostly wifi sign-ups and car-park bookings. Emails, phone numbers, car registrations and postcodes were taken.
[18] Why it matters — The hacked system held no payment details and flights were unaffected, the airports' owner said.
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07
Judge: Anthropic's blacklisting was unlawful
A California district judge ruled the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic unconstitutional. Judge Rita Lin wrote that invoking national security is "not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics".
[19] Why it matters — Anthropic had set limits on military uses of its systems, and the court called the response unlawful retaliation.
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08
First US plant for AI memory breaks ground
SK Hynix held a groundbreaking in West Lafayette, Indiana for a $4bn packaging and research site. Full production starts in the second half of 2029, about a year later than first planned.
[6] [7] Why it matters — The tariff plan rewards promised American building, and the building takes years.
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09
Two arrested over poisoned code packages
Australian police charged two men, aged 21 and 23, over a group that hid harmful code inside widely used software tools. Police said it reached more than 1,000 organisations and 500,000 stolen passwords.
[22] Why it matters — Most software is assembled from other people's parts, so one poisoned part travels everywhere at once.
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10
FBI seizes China-linked hacking platforms
The FBI seized two platforms it says a China-backed group called QTFY used against NASA, the Energy Department and the US Senate. Court papers name a private Nanjing company paid by China's Ministry of State Security.
[23] Why it matters — The tools were rented out to other criminals as a hiding service, which makes any single attack hard to trace.
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11
Insurers rewrite cover for AI that acts alone
MSIG, QBE and Beazley are redrafting cyber policies for systems that act without a human telling them to, according to eight executives. Separately, Russian-speaking criminals used the Cursor coding assistant to break into seven firms.
[24] [25] Why it matters — Nobody has settled whether a machine that decides for itself counts as an attacker in a policy.
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12
Google changes EU spam rules to dodge a fine
From 30 August Google will stop applying manual search demotions across the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. Publishers had complained and the European Commission had opened a case.
[20] Why it matters — Breaking the EU's Digital Markets Act can cost up to 10% of a company's worldwide sales.
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13
Google pays 260m pounds to UK app developers
Google agreed to settle a London claim over Play Store commissions for 260 million pounds, about $353m, with no admission of wrongdoing. The claim had been valued at over 1 billion pounds.
[21] Why it matters — It is the fourth such UK case against a big tech company since the start of 2025, after Apple, Qualcomm and Sony.
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14
Spain: green power every hour, or no grid link
Spain plans to make new data centres match 80% of their power with renewables hour by hour, not averaged across a year. Every new megawatt needs matching generation in place within 18 months.
[26] [27] Why it matters — Hourly matching means the clean power has to exist at the moment the servers draw it.
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15
Britain moves to clear phantom data centres
Ofgem proposed making data-centre developers pay a large non-refundable deposit and line up customers before joining the grid queue. Industry feedback closes in September.
[28] Why it matters — The queue has filled with projects that will never be built, delaying the ones that will.
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16
California exempts Linux from its age checks
California's legislature passed AB 1856 by 39 votes to nil, taking open-source operating systems out of its Digital Age Assurance Act. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and SteamOS fall outside it.
[29] Why it matters — The original law would have made volunteer projects collect age data like Apple and Microsoft do.
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17
OpenAI publishes its first chip numbers
At the Hot Chips conference OpenAI showed benchmark results for Jalapeno, its own chip built for answering questions rather than training. It ships in very small volumes at the end of 2026.
[30] [31] Why it matters — Its biggest customers building their own chips is part of why Nvidia is buying into the model layer.
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18
AI memory eats three times the factory
Micron told Hot Chips that stacked AI memory needs about three times the wafer area of ordinary DDR5 memory for the same capacity. The gap is widening, and standard memory contract prices rose 90% to 95% in the first quarter.
[9] Why it matters — Building more factories adds less supply than the number of factories suggests.
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19
Three more organisations disclose breaches
Boston Scientific told the SEC that an attack disrupted global operations including order shipping, and its shares fell 3.5% before the open. The ATF declared a major incident, and Apollo confirmed a break-in.
[38] [39] [40] [41] Why it matters — A medical device maker, a federal agency and a $1tn investment firm, inside one week.
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20
Uber faces a near-$1bn Dutch fine
The Dutch regulator fined Uber nearly $1bn over driver accounts switched off by software with too little human review. Its deputy chair said a computer should not make decisions with such consequences.
[32] Why it matters — Uber says it will appeal, and that permanent removals do get human review.
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21
Zillow and Redfin settle with the FTC
Zillow and Redfin settled with the FTC and five states on the morning their trial was due to begin. The FTC said Zillow paid Redfin $100m not to compete on rental listings.
[36] [37] Why it matters — The arrangement could have kept Redfin out of rental advertising for as long as nine years.
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22
Two governments bill two platforms
Poland asked Brussels to fine Meta 250 million euros. Its national cyber team flagged 122 fraudulent adverts; Meta declined to remove 106 of them and took down 10.
[34] Brazil sued Discord for $97m over child-safety failures.[35] Why it matters — Both cases are about adverts and chats the platforms are meant to police themselves.
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23
Amazon shuts its human-task marketplace
Amazon will close Mechanical Turk on 30 September, 21 years after launch. It matched workers with tiny digital jobs paying a few cents, which Jeff Bezos once called artificial artificial intelligence.
[33] Why it matters — It existed for tasks easy for people and hard for computers, and that gap has narrowed.
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24
More factories promised, none finished
Sandisk and Kioxia agreed a fresh joint investment in their Japanese flash-memory plants.
[11] Intel said fault rates on its 14A process are falling faster than planned, and Xiaomi's new phone chip is made at TSMC.[10] [12] Why it matters — Everyone is committing to build, which is exactly what the tariff plan proposes to reward.
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25
The money kept moving
Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity at over $30bn. Instinct raised $250m at a $2.5bn valuation, and robotics startup Generalist reached $3bn.
[42] [43] [44] Why it matters — Perplexity's yearly revenue has gone from under $250m to over $750m since January.
The rate is the announcement. The exception list is the rule.
A tax everyone can name is really set by a list almost nobody reads, and that list can be shortened without anyone announcing it.
The twist
The exceptions are not holes in a rule. They are what it cost to get the rule made - and unlike the headline number, they can be shortened without an announcement.
How it works
- A big rule is announced with one number
- The buyers it would hurt most ask to be excused
- They go on a list of exceptions, and the rule passes
- The number gets reported; the list does not
- Later the list is shortened, and the rule finally bites
Where you've seen this
Insurance
the price is advertised; the list of what is not covered decides whether you get paid
A free bank account
the schedule of fees at the back is the actual price
A school phone ban
the exceptions decide whether anything in the corridor changes
Speed limits
the posted number and the margin police actually act on are two different rules
The catch
Exceptions are often honest and needed. A rule written with none can do more harm than the problem it was aimed at. The trouble is that they are written where nobody looks.
And the whole of it
Nobody hid anything here. The exemptions were published, the companies asked to be excused in the open, and reporters wrote up the number because a number fits in a headline. Most of us can name the rate of every rule we live under, and the list attached to almost none of them.
What is really going on
January's chip tariff was announced as 25% and written so that almost nobody who actually buys chips would pay it, and the fight now is over the list of who is excused rather than over the rate.
Why it works on us — One percentage is easy to remember and easy to report, so a rule gets judged on the single part of it that was never doing the work.
Who gains
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Chipmakers already building in America
— Lutnick's structure would cap duty-free imports at a volume tied to committed US production, so relief tracks what a firm has already promised. SK Hynix's Indiana site got $458m in finalised US grants and up to $500m in loans.
[1] [3] [6] -
Nvidia
— Its customers are building their own chips, so it is buying into the model layer instead: a $6bn deal with Poolside, and hardware tuned for DeepSeek and Alibaba models.
[16] [17] [30] -
Chinese labs giving models away
— Tencent and Z.ai both published free models this week, and a downloadable model runs on whatever chips a buyer already has.
[13] [14] [15]
Who pays
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People buying a laptop or a games console
— The proposed round covers finished products, and a duty on a finished product is paid at the till.
[1] [2] [3] -
Startups and research labs
— They are on January's exemption list, and Commerce has signalled the list may not carry over.
[3] -
Taiwanese optics and chip-equipment firms
— China is slowing germanium and quartz shipments to the island through customs delays, and some firms are losing orders while waiting for clearance.
[5] -
8.7 million airport customers
— Their emails, phone numbers, car registrations and postcodes were taken from wifi and car-park systems.
[18]
What nobody knows yet
Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.
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01
Whether any of this becomes policy at all.
The plan rests on eight unnamed people speaking to Politico. Reuters said it could not confirm the report, and neither the White House nor the Commerce Department answered questions.
[1] [2] -
02
Which of January's exemptions survive.
Officials have only indicated in private talks that data centres, research, startups and consumer devices may not carry over. Nothing has been published.
[3] -
03
Whether Commerce can legally control remote access to chips.
Tom's Hardware reports that questions remain about the Commerce Department's authority to make this rule, and nothing has been published yet.
[4] -
04
What share of chip imports each excused group represents.
Nobody has published the split, so nobody outside Commerce can say how much January's tariff actually collected.
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05
How good Tencent's new model really is.
The claims come from Tencent's own release post, which also says the model can be slow and can over-check its own answers.
[13] -
06
Who attacked the three UK airports, and how much was taken.
Manchester Airports Group says about 8.7 million customers were affected and no payment details were held, and has not named who did it.
[18] -
07
Whether Intel's 14A progress holds.
The claim came from Intel's finance chief at an investor conference, and volume production is still about two years away.
[10] -
08
Whether SK Hynix's Indiana plant hits 2029.
It is already about a year later than the company first planned, and the site has only just broken ground.
[6] [7]
A list of exceptions is only invisible until somebody reads it. California's lawmakers rewrote one this week, 39 votes to nil, because people who understood the detail took the trouble to explain it.
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