22/05/2025

BIZ & FINANCE THURSDAY | MAY 22, 2025

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Fed official warns of ‘building’ tariff-linked price pressures WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s tariff plans are likely to push prices higher despite recent attempts at de-escalating his trade wars, a senior Federal Reserve official said on Tuesday. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff rollout since his return to office in January has unnerved investors and rocked financial markets. Recent deals to reduce tariffs on China and Britain suggest the administration is serious about wanting to negotiate deals to lower trade barriers and calm global markets. But it may not be sufficient to stop businesses from raising prices, St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem told the Economic Club of Minnesota, according to prepared remarks. “Looking ahead, price pressures appear to be building,” said Musalem, a voting member of the Fed’s rate-setting committee this year. “Anecdotally, I’ve heard from business contacts that many firms are imposing price surcharges to recoup the costs of higher tariffs.” Musalem added that recent survey data pointed to more businesses planning to raise prices over the next six months, and to consumers raising their inflation expectations despite market-based measures of expected price increases remaining broadly in check. The tariffs that Trump rolled out last month were “substantially larger” than many people had anticipated, Musalem said. “Even after the de-escalation of May 12, they seem likely to have a significant impact on the near-term economic outlook,” he noted, referring to the recent America-China deal to cut new US tariff rates down from 145% to 30% for 90 days. – AFP Fortnite back on Apple’s US App Store: Epic Games SAN FRANCISCO: Epic Games on Tuesday said its hit game Fortnite has returned to Apple’s digital App Store in the United States after being sidelined for years due to a legal battle with the iPhone maker. “ Fortnite is BACK on the App Store in the US on iPhones and iPads ... and on the Epic Games Store and AltStore in the EU!” the game maker proclaimed in a post on X. Last week, Fortnite became unavailable on the App Store around the world, apparently as the result of an updated version of the game being rejected by Apple. While Fortnite with its millions of daily players had already been unavailable to iPhone users in the US, the block on downloads of the cartoonish multiplayer shooter affected the entire globe. Apple said previously it had asked Epic in Sweden to resubmit its app update without a newly added digital storefront permitted as the result of a lawsuit in the United States. Neither Apple nor Epic disclosed what cleared the way for the Fornite app’s return in the United States. North Carolina-based Epic has battled Apple and Google for years over commissions they charge on transactions at their official stores for digital goods tailored for iOS or Android operating systems. – AFP

US AI chip export controls ‘a failure’: Nvidia CEO

o Tech titan’s market share in China has shrunk to 50% from 95% due to curbs

TAIPEI: Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said yesterday that US export controls on artificial intelligence chips to China had failed, with companies using locally developed cutting-edge technology. Huang said Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market had fallen to 50% from nearly 95% at the beginning of former president Joe Biden’s administration. “The local companies are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development,” Huang told reporters at Taiwan’s top tech show Computex. “I think, all in all, the export control was a failure,” Huang said, noting companies would use the “second best” option if they could not get Nvidia’s chips.

incredibly good at software,” Huang said. Huang also praised China-based DeepSeek, saying it had been positive for AI infrastructure and “increased the amount of computing need by maybe 100 to 1000 times”. “That’s the reason why all over the world, the AI companies are saying their GPUs are melting down,” Huang said. DeepSeek shook up the world of generative artificial intelligence with the debut of a low-cost and high-performance model that challenges the hegemony of OpenAI and other big-spending behemoths. Several countries have questioned DeepSeek’s handling of data and believe that the secretive company may be subject to the control of the Chinese government. – AFP

development of state-of-the-art technology. Nvidia and other chipmakers had lobbied against the curbs. Huang said Nvidia had written off “multiple billions of dollars” due to the export controls. He said China’s AI market would be worth US$50 billion (RM213 billion) in 2026, adding “it would be a shame not to be able to enjoy that opportunity, bring home tax revenues to United States, create jobs, sustain the industry”. “China has a vibrant technology ecosystem, and it’s very important to realise that China has 50% of the world’s AI researchers, and China is

Washington has sought in recent years to curb exports of state-of-the-art chips to China, concerned that they could be used to advance Beijing’s military systems and otherwise undermine American dominance in AI. US President Donald Trump’s administration last week rescinded some controls, answering calls by countries that said they were being shut out from crucial technology needed to develop artificial intelligence. Some US lawmakers feared the restrictions would have incentivised countries to go to China for AI chips, spurring the superpower’s

Huang signing his name at the Pegatron booth while visiting Computex in Taipei. – REUTERSPIC

Google ramps up search with AI mode SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Tuesday said it was beefing up online searches with even more generative artificial intelligence, as it presses on with embracing AI despite fears for its ad-based business model. “New AI mode is a total reimagining of search with more advanced reasoning,” said Pichai, kicking off the conference in Silicon Valley. users across several countries, according to Pichai. “That means Google Search is bringing Gen AI to more people than any other product in the world,” Pichai said. Google’s push into generative AI comes amid intensifying

that shifting away from pages of “blue links” to AI-generated summaries in Google search would mean fewer opportunities to serve up money-making ads at the heart of the company’s business model. This has also caused alarm among website publishers, such as news organisations or Wikipedia, who face a massive drop in traffic with the potential demise of Google search links that have been the main gateway to the internet for the past two decades. Fuelling those concerns, Apple executive Eddy Cue testified in federal court recently that Google’s search traffic on Apple devices declined in April for the first time in over two decades. – AFP

“You can ask longer and more complex queries... and you can go further with follow-up questions.” Google head of search Liz Reid described the freshly unveiled AI mode, now available in the US, as a powerful tool with advanced reasoning, multi modality, and the ability for users to dive deeper into searches. “It searches across the entire web, going way deeper than the traditional search,” she said. Since Google debuted AI Overviews in search results at its developers conference a year ago, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion

CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at the company’s annual developers event, said Google’s search engine would feature a new AI mode, as he boasted that “decades of research” were reaching fruition with the new technology. The search engine’s nascent AI mode goes further than the already launched AI Overviews which display answers to queries from the tech giant’s generative AI powers, above the traditional blue links to websites and ads.

competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has itself incorporated search engine features into its popular chatbot. Both companies are rapidly releasing new AI products despite ongoing challenges with preventing misinformation and establishing clear business models, and with no clear sense of how the tech will affect society. Analysts have expressed concerns