The competition between the United States and China for dominance in artificial intelligence is playing out on the diplomatic stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers’ meeting in Suzhou. While the official agenda focuses on trade imbalances and supply chain resilience, U.S. officials are using the gathering to actively promote American AI technology to Asian economies, seeking to counter China’s growing influence in the region’s digital infrastructure.
Casey K. Mace, the senior U.S. official for APEC and economic policy, told CNBC on the sidelines of the meeting that the United States is “very active in promoting U.S. AI options and solutions.” The diplomatic push comes just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump visited Beijing with a delegation of American tech CEOs, highlighting the administration’s focus on maintaining U.S. leadership in the global tech sector.
Workshops, Chengdu, and the Battle for Asia’s Digital Infrastructure
The U.S. strategy involves direct engagement with regional partners to showcase the capabilities of American AI firms. Mace revealed that U.S. tech companies are scheduled to hold workshops at an APEC “digital week” in Chengdu in July. While China is hosting the event, Mace noted that it presents “an opportunity to engage with all 21 [APEC] economies.” The working-level conversations in Suzhou have focused on promoting U.S. AI applications in specific sectors, including food traceability, genome sequencing, and biotechnology — areas where American firms hold significant advantages and where the stakes for public health and food security are high.
Mace described the tone of the discussions as “positive,” attributing this partly to the “very successful meeting between President Trump and President Xi” in Beijing last week. The diplomatic thaw between the two nations has created an opening for more substantive engagement on technology issues, even as the underlying strategic competition remains intense.
Competing Visions for Asia’s AI Future
The U.S. push in Asia is driven by the recognition that Chinese AI solutions are often cheaper and more readily available to developing economies. As Washington restricts Chinese access to advanced U.S. semiconductors, Beijing is accelerating the development of its domestic AI ecosystem and exporting its technology across the Global South. “There is pressure to distribute American compute globally,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told CNBC. “The Trump administration is right in trying to advocate and implement with this. But it will compete with Chinese hyperscalers and Chinese AI labs that are attempting to do exactly the same.”
The APEC meeting in Suzhou is itself a symbol of China’s growing confidence in hosting multilateral economic forums. China is hosting this year’s full APEC cycle, with the leaders’ summit scheduled for November in Shenzhen. The choice of Shenzhen, China’s premier technology hub, as the venue for the leaders’ meeting underscores Beijing’s intention to use APEC as a platform to showcase its own technological achievements and to shape the narrative around AI governance in the Asia-Pacific region.
For Asian economies caught between the two superpowers, the Suzhou meeting presents both an opportunity and a dilemma. The availability of competing U.S. and Chinese AI solutions gives smaller economies leverage to negotiate better terms, but it also forces them to make choices that carry significant geopolitical implications. As the AI race intensifies, the battle for Asia’s digital infrastructure is becoming one of the most consequential fronts in the broader U.S.-China technology competition.
The U.S. push in Suzhou also reflects a growing recognition in Washington that the battle for AI influence is not won solely through technical superiority, but through deployment, integration, and trust-building with partner nations. American AI companies have historically been strong in enterprise software and cloud services, but Chinese firms have made significant inroads in hardware, telecommunications, and consumer applications across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific. The workshops planned for Chengdu in July represent a direct attempt to demonstrate the practical value of American AI in domains where Chinese competitors have already established a foothold, and to make the case that partnering with U.S. firms offers advantages in data security and long-term reliability that Chinese alternatives cannot match. The outcome of these efforts will depend as much on geopolitics as on technology: in a world where choosing an AI platform increasingly implies a broader alignment with one superpower or the other, smaller nations will weigh the diplomatic and economic costs of their decisions carefully. The Suzhou meeting is an early skirmish in what promises to be a prolonged and consequential contest for the future of AI governance across the Asia-Pacific.