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THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
. The calm before the storm. Take your pick, but right now, as we write this, the US government’s tariffs have only just come into effect. That’s big news for Blueprints and PC building in general, and particularly for us moving forward.
Chinese goods have just been hit with a 20 percent tariff on all exports. That’ll extend to the majority of case manufacturing, along with peripherals, monitors, and tertiary PC componentry. There’s also been mention of tariffs of up to 100 percent hitting Taiwan, predominantly aimed at crippling TSMC’s international supply chain, although those aren’t live at this moment.
Given that Qualcomm, Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all utilize TSMC for their processors, we can expect price hikes on any new stock landing in the US. That said, TSMC does have some capacity to manufacture those chips abroad now, with the Taiwanese government recently announcing the company is now free to manufacture its 2nm products outside the country. Still, that will be a severely limited supply chain heading into the US.