TECH NEWS – The worst case scenario would be a 25% price increase in the US (essentially paying the same price as Europe…).

This all started under the administration of former US President Donald Trump. At that time, the goal was to keep Chinese hardware out of the market as much as possible, so hardware imported from that country would be subject to a 25% tariff, including graphics cards or motherboards. This would have caused a huge price increase (which eventually happened due to the use of GPUs for mining and then the pandemic), but after the election Joe Biden’s suspended the tariff for a limited period of time.

The original plan was to reinstate the tariffs on January 1st, but this was postponed until May 31st because the US government believes that the industry is not cooperating with them. Business groups in the country are upset by the decision because of the impact the delay has on their business plans. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 was already around $2000 and with the 25% tariff it would be $2500. While the higher-end products may not be hurt as much by the price increase, the entry-level and mid-range graphics cards will be!

A GeForce RTX 4060 from Nvidia is $300, while a Radeon RX 7600 from AMD is $270, and they’d be $373 and $336 respectively in the US. That’s a difference of one graphics card tier without the tariff at that price point! And if the tariff is finally implemented at the end of May, it could hurt the market’s results, just as everything was starting to recover from the pandemic and the mining craze. The graphics industry could also be brought to its knees by the tariff.

The Biden administration has started to speed up the development of the US market, for example with the CHIPS Act, in order to encourage domestic production or make it easier for companies with long-established production lines in “hostile” countries. In the meantime, consumers may have an opportunity to catch up on their machine upgrades, as almost no one will be willing to pay 25% more…

Source: WCCFTech