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Washington offers US$200 million to boost American smartphone industry in Indo-Pacific
State Department subsidies for US companies to shore up US artificial intelligence supply chain in region and counter China’s dominance
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Xinmei Shenin Washington
The US State Department will subsidise companies to roll out cheap smartphones running American software in the Indo-Pacific region, part of its “Pax Silica” initiative that seeks to shore up the resilience of the US artificial intelligence supply chain and win the AI race with China.
The US has launched the Edge AI Package, which provides up to US$200 million of funding for mobile network operators and smartphone vendors to deploy “low-cost, high-performance” handsets in some partner nations in the Indo-Pacific, the Department of State said on Thursday.
These smartphones should run on “trusted” American mobile operating systems (OS), such as Android and iOS, and fully support the US software and AI ecosystem, the State Department said.
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Companies interested in joining the programme should use US funding to lower the retail price of their handsets in Indo-Pacific countries “to a competitive level with untrusted market incumbents”, it said.
The initiative would “ensure that the digital infrastructure of our partners remains secure, autonomous, and free from coercion”, according to the State Department.
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“This programme is going to make millions of smartphones more competitive vis-a-vis subsidised, low-cost competitors,” Jacob Helberg, the State Department’s Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, said in a CNBC interview on Thursday.
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