One of the stranger effects of the Trump administration’s trade war with China has been to cause a noticeable uptick in the PC market as businesses and consumers rush to buy new computers before the full effects hit. Now might also be a good time to buy a new graphics card—for a relative value of “good”—as the US government has once again pushed back the 25 percent tariff on PC parts.
This one is a bit confusing, as technically it has nothing to do with Trump’s newly-imposed import taxes on Chinese goods, which currently sit at 30 percent. Instead it’s a further delay of an existing planned tariff that dates back to 2018, imposed by the original Trump administration in his first term before Biden but later suspended in 2019. The 25 percent tariff on China-produced graphics cards, motherboards, solid-state storage, and other components that use printed circuit boards (PCBs) has been pushed back again and again since then, most recently to June 1st of this year.
The Office of the US Trade Representative once again suspended the implementation of the original import tax, pushing it back to September 1st of 2025, as reported by Tom’s Hardware. That should stabilize US prices on many computer components coming in from China, at least for the time being. The Trump administration has a tentative agreement with the Chinese government for the 30 percent rate on most goods, currently set to expire in August, and down from an unprecedented 145 percent rate that peaked amid a flurry of chaotic updates.
The uncertainty of prices for goods and raw materials had a chilling effect on US businesses, many of which are still wary. Presumably this latest delay on the long-overdue 25 percent increase is meant to give negotiators time to set up a more permanent status quo on import taxes, and their effects on consumer prices.
The US federal government showed sensitivity to the portions of the market most likely to be immediately visible to consumers, carving out exceptions to the import taxes on finished goods like computers and smartphones, which could have increased prices by triple digits. This latest pushback on the additional 25 percent increase in tariff on PCBs seems in line with that thinking. Even so, we’re seeing a noticeable rise in prices for newly announced laptops and other electronics, like the most recent entries in the Microsoft Surface line.
With these particular tariffs delayed again and again across three different US presidential administrations, it seems unlikely that they’ll actually go into effect in September. But as with everything else in the current US economy, nailing down any particular predictions might be unwise.