U.S. President Donald Trump landed at the Beijing Capital International Airport in China to participate in a high-stakes tech-focussed meetup with President Xi Jinping on Wednesday. Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink are accompanying POTUS making for a high-powered entourage of tech and finance leaders setting the stage for major deals in AI and technology infrastructure.
President Trump, in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, said that he plans to ask President Jinping to “open up” China to these U.S.-based tech leaders to “help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level.”
Here’s what the industry leaders project
The sight of the world’s leading AI and semiconductor pioneers on Chinese soil has resulted in the projections of hard-coded tech treaties among the broader tech communities. The deals could largely focus on AI and semiconductors, industry commentators have forecasted.
“AI topic is probably one of the biggest you could tell by the list of CEOs that President Trump is bringing along with him,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of the independent tech research and advisory firm Futurum Group during a televised interview.
Newman said essentially said that President Trump could be looking to grab a strategic lead in advanced tech ecosystems through controlled economic engagement with China, that famously holds a strong position in the overall tech ecosystems.
He pointed out that China has been indirectly contributing to U.S.’ AI research and development by continuing to purchase older chip sets for billions of dollars from U.S players like Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm. Newman argued that the U.S. should continue this strategy and keep the highest-end technologies out of China’s hand as a primary source of leverage.
However, the think tank analyst also noted that China could try to cut some kind of a deal here.
“China really needs what we have, what kind of goods like the really best AI tech we’ve got. Some of the Chinese labs are already outperforming the U.S. with some of these open source models. And it’s interesting because they’re training them on a very limited amount of infrastructure. There’s their compute,” Newman noted.
“They cannot make that many Huawei chips. They don’t have the machines, lithography machines, to actually print enough of these chips at scale. That’s been so important that we keep that rule in place, that’s what gives us all our leverage.”
In the last few years, the U.S.-China trade war has increasingly transitioned from just tariff tensions to a targeted battle around commanding the supremacy in technologies like AI and semiconductors. The U.S., since 2024, has tightened export controls on advanced hardware like Nvidia’s Blackwell-class chips to China.
Amid the intensifying U.S.-China tech war. The U.S. is presently reviewing the MATCH Act, designed to become a legislative “chokepoint” strategy to block China’s access to the essential machinery required to manufacture advanced AI chips.
This act is currently moving through the Congress and has been a massive point of friction leading up to the Trump-Xi summit.
China has expressed concerns on the MATCH Act calling it a systemic block to accessing advanced tech on a global level. In retaliation, China said it would leverage its own “Malicious Entity List” to harm U.S.’s tech access as well.
These developments indicate that discussions around semiconductors are expected to take centrestage at the high-stakes Trump-Xi meetup. Donald Davhie, research associate at the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA) pointed out that AI chip access for China will be a priority agenda.
In his Truth Social post President Trump added, “I promise, that when we are together, which will be in a matter of hours, I will make that my very first request. I have never seen or heard of any idea that would be more beneficial to our incredible Countries!”
As per China’s state-run publication Global Times, China is ready to work with the U.S. to join cooperative efforts in creating a mutually benefitting tech and trade ecosystem. Quoting Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun, the report said, topics including world peace and strategic partnerships are also part of the meeting’s agenda.
Landing in Beijing
President Trump stepped off the Air Force One in Beijing with 300 Chinese students waving the flags of China and the U.S. as Chinese Vice President Han Zheng reached the airport to recieve the U.S. President. This marks the first U.S. Presidential visit to China in the last ten years.
The White House shared visuals of President Trump’s welcome with Musk and Huang stepping out of the Presidential aircraft.
On the morning of May 14, President Trump will meet President Jinping to kickoff the discussions. The discussions are slated for a time period of around eight hours as per a schedule shared by the White House. The U.S. delegation will leave Beijing on May 15.
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, Cargill CEO Brian Sikes, and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser are joining President Trump in China for this meet. General Electric CEO Larry Culp, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon are also part of the rather impressive convoy.