Trump's trade adviser defends tariffs, touts Texas Instrument investment in new Lehi plant - KSL News

The Lehi plant is not a tariff story—it is a geopolitical reallocation of analog manufacturing. TI is pulling the "glue" layer of electronics (automotive ECUs, motor control, power management) out of the Asian OSAT network. Upstream, this shifts Lam and KLA equipment orders toward US fabs and structurally erodes analog share in 中国台湾 and Malaysia. On compliance, tariffs inflate BOM costs for import-dependent OEMs, yet TI's vertical integration makes it one of the few players partially insulated. ADI, the closest analog rival, will likely announce US capacity within twelve months. NXP and ST, locked into a Europe-Asia dual-axis model, face a deeper cost-versus-security fracture. The twenty-four-month tail: the analog market bifurcates into a "US security premium" track and an "Asia cost-optimized" track. Automotive and industrial customers pay a fifteen-to-twenty-percent premium for supply-chain certainty; consumer electronics stays in Asia. TI's share shift is policy arbitrage, not a technology breakthrough. The real strategic implication of Lehi: tariffs have converted from a cost line item into a competitive weapon, and the global analog chip landscape will never again operate as a single unified market.