Four Republican members of Congress have sent a letter urging the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to block imports of foreign-made chips that have been found to infringe American patents, according to Tom's Hardware. The push comes as a patent ruling is described as imminent.
At the center of the dispute are five U.S. patents originally held by United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), a Taiwan-based chipmaker that is a longtime rival of TSMC. The lawmakers are calling on the ITC — a federal agency with the authority to bar imports of products that violate U.S. intellectual property law — to use that power if TSMC chips are found to be infringing.
The ITC is one of the few venues where patent holders can seek to stop infringing goods at the border rather than simply suing for monetary damages in federal court. An exclusion order from the agency can be a powerful commercial weapon, potentially cutting off access to the U.S. market for affected products.
The involvement of elected officials in an active trade case is notable. Congressional letters to the ITC are uncommon and signal that the case has taken on political weight beyond a standard corporate patent dispute — touching on broader debates about trade policy, semiconductor supply chains, and the role of foreign chipmakers in the U.S. market.
TSMC is the world's dominant contract chip manufacturer, producing semiconductors for Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and dozens of other American companies. Any ITC exclusion order affecting its chips could ripple across the consumer electronics and AI hardware industries.
If the ITC sides with the patent holder and issues a broad import ban, it could reshape how American companies source chips — and add new friction to an already tense global semiconductor landscape.