The White House Is Weighing Tariffs That Would End the Data-Center Exemption Protecting the AI Buildout Since January.

Politico reported on August 27, citing eight people familiar with the discussions, that the Trump administration is weighing a second round of semiconductor tariffs — extending duties beyond raw chips to the finished products built with them, including laptops, gaming consoles, and data-center servers. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick favors tying tariff-free import allowances to how much a company commits to US chip manufacturing. Officials have indicated privately that the exemptions carved out in January's 25% AI-chip tariff — covering data centers, R&D, startups, and consumer devices — may not carry over into this second phase.

The timing lands the same day SK Hynix broke ground on a $4 billion-plus advanced-packaging facility at Purdue Research Park in Indiana — the South Korean chipmaker's first US high-bandwidth memory production hub — in a ceremony attended by the state's governor and a US senator. SK Hynix controls roughly 50% of the global high-bandwidth memory market; Samsung holds about 30%; Micron accounts for most of the rest.

Read together, the two stories describe the exact mechanism Lutnick's proposed framework is meant to create: a foreign chipmaker breaking ground on US soil the same week Washington signals that companies without a comparable domestic commitment could lose the exemptions protecting them today. Trump has floated tariffs near 100% on semiconductors before, with manufacturing exemptions that never fully materialized — this round is explicitly designed to make the exemption conditional rather than automatic, and tech companies have already begun lobbying to soften it.

The framework remains genuinely preliminary, and officials say it could change substantially before anything is finalized. But the direction is clear enough: a policy that once protected the entire AI buildout with a blanket exemption is moving toward one that rewards specific companies for specific domestic investments — meaning firms without a groundbreaking ceremony of their own may find January's shield gone by the time Phase 2 actually lands.