For years, the premise of U.S. technology policy toward China has rested on an important foundational assumption: without access to Western semiconductors, China’s artificial intelligence ambitions would inevitably stall. The strategy of export controls was designed to exploit this vulnerability, cutting off the supply of advanced chips and the equipment needed to manufacture them.
For the past two years, the prevailing narrative in the global artificial intelligence race has been one of American dominance. Driven by massive capital investment from Silicon Valley and the compute power of Nvidia, U.S. companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have consistently set the frontier of AI capabilities.
The market’s appetite for artificial intelligence hardware has propelled another chipmaker to a blockbuster public debut. Cerebras Systems, a startup that designs massive, wafer-scale AI processors, priced its initial public offering at $185 per share on Wednesday, significantly above its already upwardly revised target range.
As President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping convene in Beijing for their highly anticipated summit, the agenda is dominated by familiar issues: trade tariffs, Taiwan, and semiconductor export controls.
The geopolitical battle over artificial intelligence has entered a new phase, moving beyond hardware export controls to the direct restriction of access to frontier software models. The latest flashpoint centers on Anthropic’s highly anticipated, yet unreleased, “Mythos” model.
For the past decade, the success of consumer technology platforms has been measured by a single, ubiquitous metric: Daily Active Users (DAU). Now, Baidu is attempting to rewrite the scorecard for the artificial intelligence era.
China’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency has achieved a significant milestone in the memory sector. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), the country’s leading domestic DRAM manufacturer, has successfully brought its DDR5 memory modules to the commercial market, demonstrating rapid progress in a critical component of the AI hardware supply chain.
Tencent Holdings Ltd. delivered a mixed set of first-quarter results on Wednesday, missing revenue expectations due to a slowdown in its domestic gaming business, but demonstrating significant momentum in its artificial intelligence initiatives across advertising and enterprise services.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reported a dramatic collapse in profitability for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, as the company’s aggressive investment in artificial intelligence and its ongoing price war in cloud computing continued to devastate margins.
The most significant signal ahead of the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing did not come from a press briefing or a policy paper. It came from a flight manifest. It was commonly believed that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would not joining the U.S.
