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Dan chats with analyst Jack Gold about the $13 billion OpenAI acquisition few others seem to be talking about.

Ready for an import tax on all the big-ticket items you buy, unless you are a member of an old-order Amish fellowship in the wilds of Lancaster, Pa.?

That’s what’s going to happen to American consumers and enterprises if the Trump administration’s expected semiconductor tariffs come to pass.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said last week that the U.S. is looking to issue a broad tariff on semiconductors. Although the administration hasn’t actually unveiled the tariffs yet, any such levy could have a scorched earth effect on semiconductors imported into the U.S.

The import taxes are also expected to effect a range of products that use semiconductors. The duties will be imposed on an expanded range of products made alongside chips, including laptops, data center servers and gaming hardware, eight people familiar with the matter told Politico in a report recently.

“Nearly all leading-edge chips are built by [Taiwan-based] TSMC,” J.Gold Associates principal analyst Jack Gold wrote in an email to me. “If there really are across-the-board tariffs on foreign built/designed chips, its going to affect a huge number of products.

“The impact on the actual chip companies (TSMC is only the contract manufacturer) would mean that they would need to raise prices on their products, and that would get reflected in the end user prices as well,” Gold elucidated. “It would also affect many memory chips since except for Micron, they are mostly made in Korea (SK Hynix, Samsung). “

Even Intel gets a significant portion of its chips from TSMC, Gold noted.

So unless there are exceptions made for U.S. companies that just get their chips made by TSMC, or other Chinese companies, then prices could drastically  increase, the analyst said.

“Electronics can make up from 10-20% of the cost of an appliance, to 80% of a PC or server, and everything in between (cars now have up to 50% of their cost dedicated to the electronics inside),” Gold added.

Reports about the potential tariffs suggest that foreign companies could avoid them by building chip factories in the States, as some companies like Nokia are already doing.

But this will be expensive and take some time.

“A new manufacturing plant for leading-edge semiconductors can take 3-4 years to build, and cost $20B or more for each fab,” Gold noted. “So shifting to new fabs in the US would be a long term project, and it would need to way to finance them.”

Gold said he expects some form of data center chip exemption to be part of any wider tariff package. This wouldn’t be a surprise coming from the data center boosters in the Trump administration, including the president himself.

“If there isn’t, first the market would probably go into freefall, and the industrial base in this country would react strongly,” Gold suggested.

He elucidated further on how tariffs could have an impact on Nvidia’s GPUs and the AI data center buildout. Gold suggested to me that additional expense that tariffs could add to the already spendy totals for the Nvidia data center scaffolding chips. 

“I think that there would likely be enough pressure in the system that would make it hard for Trump to put tariffs on, or at least any that are significant,” Gold said. “For example, a high end GPU from Nvidia is already $40K. Would people sit still for that being $50K when you have to buy millions of them?”

“But it’s not just datacenter chips that need exemption,” the analyst said.

“Will people be OK paying an extra 20% or more for a new PC? How about another 15% for your new car? Or your appliances? There are very few products anymore that don’t have chips inside. And BTW, what about memory chips, that are now a significant portion of the totals system cost?” he added.

As you may expect, domestic American semiconductor manufacturers cannot even hope to deliver enough integrated circuits to meet U.S. demand.

“Not even close,” said Gold. The only viable high-end chip maker is Intel, and they provide a small portion of the market. The only viable memory maker is Micron, and it sources chips for others as well to meet demand.”

Gold did note that Texas Instruments makes chips in the U.S., but he also said that they are dedicated to lower end specialty chips for IoT and industrial needs.

So, certainly not the expensive data center GPUs or the consumer-level CPUs that would be among the main targets of the tariffs.

“If you really want to boast the ability for China to compete in the rest of the world, putting tariffs on chips from U.S. companies would be a huge boon to their business,” Gold said.

“China (not Taiwan) is already making great strides in high performance chip making and designs, and if you raise prices for U.S. chips, then their products become even more attractive to other countries and gives them even more incentive to compete,“ Gold suggested.

The analyst said that getting a Chinese chip that may offer 10% or 20% less performance, when you have to pay 30% or more for a U.S. chip, is a recipe for disaster.

“So I see chip tariffs as being the exact opposite effect of what the administration wants to do,” Gold concluded.

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Nokia launches its Mobile Core Early Access program on Tuesday, which the Nordic vendor said will enable operators to test out new core features and capabilities.

I spoke to  Kal De, senior VP of core networks at Nokia, about the launch, as well as about how the future of overall core networks are developing as we move from the latter half of the 5G era and — soon enough — into a new 6G age.

“The fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is accelerate innovation into the hands of customer but do that without imposing ... SASE [Secure Access Service Edge] on the customer,” De told me on a video call.

“Our first and foremost goal is ... improve the speed and fidelity of communication, interaction [and] feedback through an environment that is hyper-simplified and hyper-automated. Where we can put our leading-edge, near-production ready innovations, some of which have reached general availability into the hands of the customer,” he said. Such an environment is continuously updated, De added.

One of core use cases highlighted was an AI/machine learning-enabled paging optimization feature for user equipment like smartphones.

This was said to enable the core to deliver internet pages to smartphones on a 5G connection faster and with fewer attempts to deliver the page. Paging attempt success rates have traditionally averaged around 80%, but adding AI to the mix raises the success rate up into the high 90% range.

“The relevance of this environment is ... we are now not just talking about features ... we are talking about end-to-end use cases that have the promise of value,” De said.

Also changing with the Early Access program is that Nokia will offer “instant gratification” on new core features that are either in or near production, rather than making a CTO wait six months or a year before they can access them.

The Early Access environment is designed for late-period 5G and moving into 6G, De noted. Much of this will relate to core networks starting to be more AI-enabled.

While the De said that AI is moving to the forefront of the discussion for operators, he hopes to put more AI native features before CTOs and other network executives soon.

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“The team is working on use cases that exercise the concept of the core being AI native,” he said. “Small models running co-load with the function, inferencing happening at the edge [and] agents being able to do reasoning in real-time, are cutting across the different parts of the core fabric.”

Nokia, De added, will be able to put all of these elements into the hands of the operator in the near future.

De said that he is “bullish” about Nokia’s core business, noting that the vendor is “assuredly winning more often than not” in competitive situations.

“Our financial situation across the entire fabric of what we do in mobile core is profitable,” he stated. 

De also expressed confidence that the core profit margin will increase in the future, citing threereasons.

The obvious one is that AI is enabling a set of use cases; the second is the readiness of standards and specifications for 6G. “The speed at which the market and the industry is evolving will force us to establish de facto standards, where its safely possible to do that, of course we can’t get too far ahead of 6G,” De said.

The final element he noted is that many of the use cases don’t actually involve human subscribers but AI agent communications and other devices.

“They’re not just mobile phones anymore,” he said. For instance, drones are coming into play across many circumstances, from fighting in hot wars, to delivering medicine, and flying to disaster relief situations.

“All of this experience is going to converge,” De said. He noted that as the core evolves further it will not be “designed in a vacuum” but made in co-operation with operator partners. 

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French major mobile network operator (MNO) Orange recently purchased Dome, the 5G private network core technology, from startup Obvios.

Orange describes the core as enabling secure sovereign communications for defense and public safety applications.

The acquisition of Obvios’s assets strengthens Orange’s offering for critical infrastructure operators. In the current demanding geopolitical context, Orange said that it’s expanding its capabilities to deliver sovereign private 5G solutions that address security, operational control and business continuity.

You, dear reader, may not associate 5G private networks with data sovereignty, the concept that digital information is subject to the laws and frameworks of a particular country. This is particularly true when commentators are already pointing to Europe’s digital sovereignty and the way it can leverage its regulatory excellence in digital rights protection in space.

Remaining earthbound for the moment, however, Orange plans to offer the easily secure, deployable private 5G Dome core that will enable enterprises — and others — to build and operate their own mobile networks independently of MNOs.

“Orange views the acquisition of Dome as strengthening its position in this area by bringing a French-developed private 5G core under its control, reducing reliance on external suppliers and giving mission-critical customers greater control over sensitive data and network operations,” Asad Khan, 5G research director at SNS Telecom and IT told me.

“Given the current geopolitical landscape and growing friction between the U.S. and major European economies, sovereignty has become a major consideration for defense and critical infrastructure contracts in Europe,” Khan said, echoing Orange’s comments on why it wanted to get into the Dome.

Obvios was, at one time, considered one of the bright spots of French private network scene. For instance, the startup used its Dome software and 5G private networks to support national channel France Television’s daily coverage of the torch relay for the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris.

That is not the only private network project Obvios has been involved in, as Khan noted.

“As per our database of private network projects, Obvios has also been involved in projects across the agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, defense and public safety verticals, including projects with the French Armed Forces, Pays de la Loire Chamber of Agriculture, cable manufacturer ACOME and IHU Strasbourg,” he said.

Obvios is still in business, spun out from b<>com, the French Technological Research Institute, in 2023. But it has undergone a major corporate shake up, entering a court-sanctioned restructuring process.

So the well-regarded and proven Dome private core software and the team that developed it were available for a company like Orange to pick up.

I asked Khan if he expected more operators to buy into private network startups, or at least their technology, this year or into 2027:

“That's certainly possible,” he said. “Especially if they've had a close working relationship together.”

“For example, Spanish 5G core specialist Atika Technologies is working closely with Telefónica on private 5G projects for the country's Ministry of Defense,” the analyst said.

“I'm not suggesting that Telefónica will buy Atika, but there's a similar sort of synergy there to what we've seen with Orange's acquisition of Dome,” Kahn added.