The Trump administration is reportedly considering “a new round of sweeping tariffs on semiconductors,” which could affect the gaming industry in a big way once more.
With game consoles and GPUs already at staggering prices after last year’s round of tariffs among other reasons, the so-called “AI boom” which demands an unprecedented amount of tech to begin with is now potentially set to cause another increase in price and further the shortage.
The report today by Politico, citing eight people familiar with discussions within the Trump administration, says that tariffs under discussion would “dramatically expand the number of tech products subject to the duties, hitting not just chips but potentially many of the goods made with them, such as laptops, gaming consoles or the servers that fill data centers.”
This is due to Trump’s administration wishing to “juice more domestic production” of semiconductors, but experts say that “advanced chip factories cost billions of dollars and take years, if not decades to build.” And so we get more tariffs in the meantime.
PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, PC gaming, you name it: it’s all been affected negatively in 2025 and 2026, both due to tariffs and the world powers’ and tech industry’s incessant need to out-do each other by powering AI data centers to win the assumed AI war.
“So just to sum up the past year or so, the Trump regime introduced tariffs that impacted gaming,” wrote tech industry analyst Daniel Ahmad. “Gaming consoles/hardware saw an increase in prices to pass the costs along to players. The tariffs were then struck down by the Supreme Court, but partially remain. The tariff refunds go to the company, but not to you. The cost of hardware has not come down, and if anything it’s gone up even more because of the AI driven demand for memory that has led to a shortage and price surge.”
There are scant cases of tariff refunds in our industry—positive examples being PC cooler company ARCTIC and handheld maker Playdate—but the big boys like Nintendo are actively fighting against the same sort of thing in court in the US.
With Sony and Microsoft both planning to release new consoles some time over the next few years, I genuinely have no idea how they will be able to make it work, let alone what the astronomical prices of them will be if they are even able to launch with how everything is going lately. And it’s probably all for nothing.
“This may be the single dumbest way imaginable to pursue American dominance in AI,” one tech official that served in the first Trump administration told Politico. “It’s like kneecapping yourself at the starting line.”
