Name: Howard Lutnick breaks down recent $250B trade deal with Taiwan
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T06:05:26.000Z
Duration: 5 min 19 s
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Well, let's get more now on that and much more.

Joining us now is the man who negotiated this deal.

Howard Lutnick is the U.S. secretary of Commerce.

Secretary Ludnick, thank you very much for joining us.

You might have heard some of the news that Christina and Kelly and I were just discussing.

As part of this deal, have you gotten commitments from Taiwan Semiconductor, the company that they will expand that already expanding facility that you and I sat down in six months ago.

So they just bought hundreds of acres adjacent to their property.

Now I'm going to let them go through it with their board and give them time.

But of the $250 billion of commitment, that is directly from companies.

So basically there's two commitments from Taiwan.

There's 250 billion that comes directly from companies and then there's 250 billion supplied by the government to help their smaller and medium sized companies all and bring that whole supply chain to America.

So we're going to bring it all over so we become self sufficient in the capacity of building semiconductors.

This is exactly what Donald Trump said he was going to do and he is doing it today.

This is the kind of scale that Donald Trump operates in.

I'm not, I'm not a master like you probably are, Mr. Secretary, but that's $500 billion.

I know a lot of that obviously is going to go to this Arizona facility that Christina and I were talking about.

Do you expect there'll be other investments in the United States made as part of that 250 plus 250.

So what we did is we gave Taiwan $100 billion credit because TSMC came in with that 100 billion in 2025 with the Trump administration.

Now I expect TSMC to come in huge, bigger.

You've seen reports that possibly doubling in size in America, Right.

So that's tsmc, but then we have the rest of the supply chain of semiconductors.

Everything you have to remember like each chip has a translator in it, right?

What connects the power to the chip, what connects the chip to what you see on your screen.

All those bits and parts, they all need to come here.

And so we're going to have hundreds of companies coming here.

We're going to build giant semiconductor industrial parks in America and we are going to bring semiconductors home to America.

We're getting a commitment from not only Taiwan semi and their companies, but

to your point, the Taiwanese government itself.

It sounds like what they're getting is a reduction of that reciprocal tariff rate 20% to 15% in some cases.

If it's an aircraft part, if it's certain generic drugs, that goes to zero.

Is that the win that Taiwan will get and want to promote in their nation?

And we get the investment in semiconductors.

Secretary, this expected build out not just in Arizona but across the country, so it's a couple of fold exactly what you said.

They get generic pharmaceuticals, airplane parts, things that, you know, we're very accommodating for because we want those things to come in tariff free, unavailable natural resources.

To the extent they grow something that we don't grow here, that won't come with a tariff.

But then their semiconductors, it goes like this.

If they commit to build in America, they can bring in their semiconductors during the time that they're building in America without a tariff that is special for them.

If we at the Department of Commerce, if we approve their plan, they can then bring in semiconductors of two and a half times that amount.

So if they build a million, let's say wafers, they could bring in two and a half million wafers while they're building in America.

So the objective is to bring 40% of Taiwan's entire supply chain and production to domestically bring it in to America.

And here's the During President Trump's term, this is fire right now.

These people have committed to try to build this full infrastructure and do it now in America.

If they don't build in America, the tariffs likely to be 100%.