Donald Trump on semiconductors: what the evidence says · JRE #2219
“They stole 95% of our business. It's in Taiwan right now.”
What the evidence says
Trump repeated a version of this claim throughout 2024-2026, sometimes citing 90%, 95%, 98%, or "almost 100%" of the chip business as having moved to Taiwan. Industry data support a high figure only for the most advanced chip fabrication: Taiwan's TSMC produces over 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors, largely because U.S. firms shifted decades ago to a design-only ("fabless") business model rather than because Taiwan took the business by force or deception. That narrower manufacturing statistic does not describe the whole chip industry: U.S.-headquartered companies still generate roughly half of global semiconductor revenue and dominate chip design, and overall U.S. domestic chip-manufacturing capacity, while diminished from about 37% of world output in 1990, remains meaningfully above zero and is the target of active rebuilding efforts (federal investment in Intel, incentives tied to Nvidia's China sales, new U.S. fabs). Taiwanese officials and independent industry analysts have also disputed the framing that this dominance was "stolen," attributing it instead to decades of Taiwanese capital investment and manufacturing specialization. The claim is best characterized as exaggerated: the 90%+ figure has a real basis for advanced-node manufacturing specifically, but applying it to "our business" as a whole, and describing the shift as theft, overstates and mischaracterizes what happened.