Trump goes to China. He brings his friends. Or maybe his investors. The guest list reads like a Silicon Valley roll call: Tim Cook from Apple. Elon Musk of Tesla. Jensen Huang at Nvidia.
An Nvidia rep said Huang is there to support American goals. Fine. But the real talk? It won’t be about semiconductors first.
War and Chips
Expect the hard stuff. Iran. Taiwan. The fact that we’re now fighting wars with algorithms.
David Leslie from the Alan Turing Institute calls this “AI-supported warfare.” Look at Venezuela. Look at Gaza. Look at the chaos in Iran. These aren’t hypotheticals anymore. They happened in the last eight months.
The US and China already know each other here. They’ve been whispering about it, especially when nuclear codes get involved.
“We’ve found ourselves in a new age of AI-supported warfare.”
Then there is the security problem. Anthropic just dropped Mythos. It’s a cyber-war model. Powerful. Dangerous. They couldn’t give it to the public. Says the company. Poses “unprecedented” risks.
Leslie sees a bigger picture though. Trump listens to Silicon Valley. Really listens. So when they talk IP theft, or cyber vulnerabilities, who actually decides the policy? Diplomats? Or the guys who sold their IPOs last Tuesday?
Leslie thinks it’s the latter. Policy is now dictated by tech interests. Not the other way around.
The Race Changes
While Washington chats, Beijing builds.
China isn’t playing catch-up blindly. They have a mandate: 70% AI penetration in key industries by 2028? No, wait. 2027.
They are winning the numbers game too. Patents? China leads. Publications? China leads. Physical AI, aka robotics? Definitely China. The Stanford report confirms the gap is closing fast. DeepSeek is out there, offering a cheaper ChatGPT. Huawei and Alibaba are designing their own chips. They don’t need us as much.
Leverage Shifts
Rare earths matter. Cerium. Lanthanum. You need them for chips. You need them for everything modern. China has them.
Leslie puts it bluntly: The US position is weaker than before. Our stockpiles are thin. We need materials to rebuild.
Jacob Gunter from MERICS suggests Beijing might ask for eased export rules. A way to balance trade? Maybe.
But here’s the kicker. When Trump allowed some Nvidia chips through recently? Beijing said no thanks. They prefer feeding their own domestic producers. Long game.
Gunter suspects the “red lines” won’t move. AI and semiconductors stay locked down. Rubio and the security hawks will kill any soft deal. Trump might try, but he’ll likely leave those topics on the table, untouched.
Why We Should Care
Weird thing to think about mid-summit. What if this race threatens us all?
The US is hitting “Techlash 2.0.” Data centers eat water. They eat electricity. They push people out of neighborhoods. Jobs vanish. Even tech jobs.
China plays it different. Centralized power. Aggressive industrial policy. Leslie argues they feel more confident serving the public interest. Their domestic policies aim to shield citizens from the worst harms of AI adoption.
The pace isn’t slowing.
China sees itself as a leader, not just a follower. They believe the technology can serve the population if managed right. The US is reacting to market forces and energy grids bursting at the seams.
So Trump sits down. Musk is there. Huang is there. Xi waits.
The chips stay banned. The war tools keep getting smarter.
What happens when the electricity runs out?
