Trump’s Bumbling, Racist Anti-China Protectionism Extends To Data Centers
from the corrupt-and-incompetent,-at-scale dept
The Trump administration’s anti-Chinese protectionism is routinely a disastrous, xenophobic mess that mostly just injects chaos, cronyism, and higher prices into U.S. tech markets under the pretense of protecting privacy and national security. All propped up by bumbling Democrats and a corporate press incapable of highlighting that the emperor is buck-ass naked.
Four years of histrionics about China’s connection to TikTok, for example, simply resulted in the administration with Democrat help) hijacking the platform and giving it to his billionaire buddies, who’ll then do all the same things lawmakers worried about China doing (propaganda, privacy abuses).
There was also a massive, decade-long hysterical freak-out about Huawei gear in U.S. telecom networks, which resulted in the government engaging in a massive “rip and replace” campaign that Congress simply forgot to finish funding or following up on, resulting in higher prices for consumers and telecoms alike.
More recently there was the Trump FCC’s efforts to try and ban Chinese drones based on completely baseless security fear mongering, which overseas companies have found it trivial to bypass because the administration has mostly lobotomized our regulators. The result has been higher consumer prices, lots of market chaos, furious hobbyists, and shittier product availability.
The Trump administration is utterly incompetent, historically corrupt, and completely incapable of adopting protectionism at this scale even if it was a good idea (it’s not). Yet that’s not really been well reflected in most journalism covering the steady extension of this bumbling protectionism into Chinese routers, robots, vacuums, lawnmowers, and cheap inverters (necessary to manage climate change mitigation).
Now the Trump administration is pretending it’s going to eliminate the entirety of Chinese hardware — including transceivers — from domestic U.S. data centers. Again there’s zero real indication the Trump administration is capable of any of this, but that’s not really reflected in coverage by Reuters. Though they do bother to mention this will likely result in higher prices for everybody:
“A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.”
This bumbling protectionism highlights the bizarre incoherence of the Trump administration. The underlying corruption has the administration fixated on gutting, defunding, and destaffing regulators now managed by a rotating crop of unqualified sycophants. But they then like to pretend they can then place these elaborate policy proposals on the back of whatever’s left, and expect it all to just work.
They despise and hate competent governance and regulatory autonomy, do everything in their power to dismantle it, then pretend the resulting pile of garbage remains load-bearing for real policy.
At the same time, the administration professes to be shoring up U.S. cybersecurity defenses while simultaneously dismantling domestic cybersecurity preparedness. It’s an incoherent mess, and more often than not Trump cybersecurity policy is indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
What Trumpism mostly wants is a tribute system wherein they erect new barriers to market entry, then receive assorted tribute by companies that want to still operate in the country. They also want to redirect more business to the administration’s friends, donors, and family (like the Trump sons’ drone companies). Time and time again, national security and privacy are mostly just used for scare-mongering purposes.
Worse, Democrats often help them and frequently aren’t much better. See for example this effort by Dem lawmakers in Michigan to ban Chinese EVs from even visiting the state under the pretense of protecting U.S. consumer privacy. Or their massive policy own-goal on supporting a ban of TikTok during an election season where authoritarianism was on the line, and the youth vote mattered more than ever.
Ideally, I’d maintain that the best approach is to let Chinese gear (EVs, robots, AI, vacuums, drones) compete in the U.S. market, but shore up your labor, privacy, environmental, and consumer protection regulators to ensure a truly level playing field. Domestic U.S. corporate giants don’t like that because it means more competition and oversight, so instead we get this clumsy, corrupt absurdism.
Even if anti-Chinese protectionism was a good idea (it’s not), this administration is too corrupt, erratic, and incompetent to accomplish it. Yet when you’re reading tech press coverage of Trump’s latest protectionist push, I’d like you to notice how that’s uniformly either downplayed or ignored entirely.
Filed Under: ai, china, chinese, data centers, drones, hardware, protectionism
Comments on “Trump’s Bumbling, Racist Anti-China Protectionism Extends To Data Centers”
That’s what happens when you put unrepentant bigots and people without any real knowledge/expertise in a given field enough power: They use it so stupidly and with so little foresight into the consequences of using that power that it seems incoherent to everyone else, even though it makes perfect sense to the people using said power. It’s like how Trump thinks spreading the MMR vaccine into multiple shots is a good idea—sure, it sounds logical on its face, but looking a millimeter beyond the surface reveals a bunch of problems with the idea. (One of those problems is how spacing out those vaccinations puts a strain on parents, who now how to worry about the stress of multiple separate trips to the doctor for their child instead of one.) Sensible thinking isn’t a hallmark of these idiots; if anything, I’m surprised things aren’t worse due to their idiocy. Then again, there are two years left in his term…
Coherent and Lumentum don’t produce logical chips (like CPUs and GPUs) but network components and captors.
Intel still relies on TSMC and Samsung for its graphics cards and I/O devices.
AMD and Nvidia are fabless companies, they design theirs own chips but all are built by TSMC.
US don’t produce any RAM.
So yes, China, Taiwan and Korea produces +90% of datacenters components (and certainly 99% of AI datacenters).
Re:
On second thought, this particular Trump policy is accidentally a good idea. Stopped clock, twice a day, etc.
Meaty article needs salt, scare quotes.
May we please stop calling this “protectionism”? Trump’s policy is even less protective than a “protection” racket: It is setting fire to your own store and then kneecapping yourself, because—um, because.
Trade protectionism needs to protect someone’s economic interests against market competition. This is mindless trade destructionism.
Trump’s trade policy is “protectionist” only in the same sense that RFK Jr. protects Americans’ health, the Trumpified EPA protects the environment, Trump’s voting rights policy protects election integrity, Trump protects freedom of speech, Trump protects religious freedom, TRAP laws and abortion bans protect life, Trump protects American Greatness, etc., etc., ad Magnam nauseam.
This touches on another subject discussed here
“Domestic U.S. corporate giants don’t like that because it means more competition and oversight, so instead we get this clumsy, corrupt absurdism.”
One of best and easiest things we could do — in the interest of US national security — would be shut down Flock entirely and immediately.
Because all that beautiful data is being harvested by any intelligence agency worth of the name and they’re not just doing spot searches on it to stalk ex-girlfriends and other abusive things. No, they’re storing all of it (because they can) and they’re doing serious analysis (because they can) in order to extract as much actionable intelligence as possible from it. And the best part — from their point of view — is that they didn’t have to design it, build it, run it, or pay for it. Flock did that for them, for free. All they’ve had to do is grab the data, and I have zero doubt that they’ve been doing that since the beginning.
(Surely nobody can believe that Flock put any serious time, effort, or money into security. And even if they did: they’re no match for the Chinese, or the Russians, or pretty much anybody else.)
It would not surprise me at all to find out that — for example — the Chinese have invested in Flock (through shell companies) and/or lobbied for Flock (through shell organizations) because these would be cheap investments with an enormous payoff. But this administration is far, far too stupid to consider this or to investigate it or to do something about it — and even if they tried, whatever they did would be easily derailed by a $10M Flock contribution to Trump.
The Trump regime executes Americans in the street, but they want us to believe the enemy is across an ocean.
It’s not any more “racist” to be against the CCP than it is to be against Russia, you utter moron.
This is why the word means nothing when you use it.
Re:
It is when the only reason people are against the CCP comes down to racism against East Asian people. Russia—which is a significant part of Asia, mind you!—is just as much of a authoritarian capitalist hellscape as China, but Trump is more than happy to give Putin a pass on basically anything because Putin is a white guy. A number of right-wing
griftersmedia personalities were also more than happy to ignore Russia’s crimes until Viktor Orban got ousted from power and all that money he was paying those people dried up.bizarre incompetence
I feel that pretending that this is incompetence is also playing into the agenda. It’s all intentional, and obviously so. They add laws and remove consistent enforcement so that they can then profit off gatekeeping the justice, or off of helping their friends bypass the same laws. The “art” of the “deal”.