On Tuesday, the U.S. Commerce Department raised steel and aluminum tariffs on more than 400 products, including wind turbines, mobile cranes, appliances, bulldozers, railcars, motorcycles, marine engines, furniture, and hundreds more. The department added 407 product categories to the list of “derivative” steel and aluminum products covered by sectoral tariffs, which apply a 50% tariff on steel and aluminum content and the country rate on non-steel and non-aluminum content. In a research note, Evercore ISI estimated the move will raise the effective tariff rate by 1 percentage point for more than 400 product codes representing over $200 billion in imports last year. The department is also adding imported parts for automotive exhaust systems and electrical steel for electric vehicles, buses, air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, and dryers to the new tariffs. The department was advised not to add the parts by foreign automakers, who said the U.S. cannot meet demand. Tesla crea...
The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that two Chinese nationals were arrested in California and charged with illegally delivering Nvidia H100s and other AI chips worth tens of millions of dollars to China. According to a criminal complaint, Chuan Geng, 28, of Pasadena, and Shiwei Yang, 28, of El Monte, exported cutting-edge Nvidia chips and other technology to China between October 2022 and July 2025 without securing the necessary licenses from the U.S. Commerce Department. The complaint claims that Geng and Yang's El Monte-based business, ALX Solutions Inc., was established in 2022, just after the United States started requiring licenses for the chips and enacted broad export restrictions on technology to China. An Nvidia representative declined to comment. Shipping and freight forwarding firms in Singapore and Malaysia, which are frequently used as transshipment hubs for illicit goods to China, received more than 20 shipments from ALX Solutions. In January 2024, ALX rec...