SHANGHAI, CHINA – JULY 17: Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the opening ceremony of the High-Level Meeting on Global Governance of the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Friday, July 17, 2026.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping began his first state visit to the United States in more than a decade with increased confidence. The announcement of a series of chips and models could give the U.S. government pause before further tightening high-tech export controls.
Recent releases of new chips and AI models from domestic champions such as Huawei Technologies and Huawei Technologies alibaba grouphas made clear the Chinese government’s insistence that there are limits to the significant tools the U.S. government uses against Chinese AI. Its technological limitations can slow China’s ambitions, but they cannot stop them.
“For Mr. Xi, the leverage is not that we’ve caught up, but that they simply can’t stop us technologically,” said Lizzie Li, a research fellow at the Asia Society Policy Research Institute.
The U.S. government has long restricted China’s access to Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI chips and the equipment that makes them, betting that depleted computing power will leave China a generation behind in AI. Silicon Valley executives have also accused Chinese AI companies of “distilling,” or using training models based on the output of more advanced systems in the United States, a claim the Chinese government rejects.
Against this backdrop, Huawei has brought forward the release of its next AI chip by three quarters. Alibaba has announced what it calls the country’s most powerful AI processor. DeepSeek, the startup that took global markets by storm last year with its low-cost models, has reportedly launched the largest known lineup of Huawei chips ever built.
“President Xi’s level of confidence in how great China is in terms of technology and innovation is at an all-time high,” said George Chen, partner and chairman of the digital practice at the Asia Group, a Washington-based policy consultancy. “When you sit at the table, you need cards, and Mr. Xi has many cards,” Chen said, adding that the timing was “deliberately” to boost confidence ahead of the summit.
This will be President Xi’s first visit to the White House in 11 years, following President Trump’s state visit to Beijing in May. The timing of the tech giant’s flagship product release, just days before the summit, has reignited debate about whether China’s AI industry has reached an inflection point.
Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of “The War on Chips,” said China has a history of announcing new projects around meetings with senior policymakers as part of an effort to show that Chinese companies are “catching up.”
However, he said the US model remains ahead of the curve in terms of technology benchmarks and profitability. U.S. companies such as Anthropic and Open AI generate 50 to 100 times more revenue than comparable Chinese companies, he said.
It got late but it didn’t stop
SHANGHAI, CHINA – JULY 17, 2026: Zhenwu M890, an AI chip built on a parallel computing architecture developed in-house by Alibaba’s T-Head, at the World AI Conference on Friday, July 17, 2026 in Shanghai, China.
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“The production schedule does seem to be accelerating” for Huawei chips, said Sigrid Wang, an analyst at Hutong Research who specializes in China. This clustering “provides more examples for Mr. Xi to make when he argues that while U.S. regulations may slow down China’s technology development, they will not prevent Chinese companies from finding another path forward,” Wang said.
Chinese companies are trying to compensate for the vulnerabilities of individual chips by connecting thousands of chips into large clusters through faster connections.
However, this approach has limitations. Huawei’s latest SuperPoD computing architecture links far fewer processors than originally planned, with each chip still delivering about half the compute of Nvidia. Chairman Eric Xu acknowledged that Huawei may not be able to manufacture enough chips to meet domestic demand and that China’s AI developers may not be advanced enough to experience fraudulent safety risks.
“Chinese semiconductor companies have not made any breakthroughs in recent years,” said Xiaomeng Lu, director of Eurasia Group. “The basic competitive environment has not changed.”
Miller said Chinese companies still face a significant shortage of chips needed to train and deploy advanced models, and rely heavily on chip smuggling and access to data centers outside China. “China remains highly dependent on the United States for advanced chips.”
table curb
With President Trump hosting President Xi Jinping as a state guest for several days, neither side appears ready to put chip export restrictions on the table.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer met with Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York over the weekend to establish a formal AI channel to alert on incidents. But Greer made it clear that export controls for advanced chips and chip-making equipment are not on the agenda.
“It is surprising that the issue of chip export controls was not brought up at this summit, considering that Mr. Xi has frequently brought up the issue of chip export controls with Mr. Biden,” Zhang said. The Chinese president has also not invited a delegation of business executives and technology leaders to the summit, according to media reports.
Beijing’s immediate priorities may lie elsewhere. Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Xi is likely to press Trump for greater cooperation on the Taiwan issue, and in return the Chinese leader could offer help on the Iran issue, including restoring free navigation for ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Realigning the U.S.-China technology relationship requires a lot of substantive work,” Li said. “Unfortunately it is not a product of the summit, but at least not this time.”
