Trump landed in Beijing in May 2026 with a plane full of US tech, business and AI leaders. The guest list told the story before the meetings began. Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook were all there. The wider delegation included leaders from Boeing, BlackRock, Blackstone, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Meta, Visa and other major companies. All had direct stakes in China through customers, factories, suppliers, payments, capital, aircraft sales or chip access. It looked like a travelling boardroom, because the trip was built around business power.
Huang joined late, during a refuelling stop in Alaska, after Nvidia’s China problem had become impossible to ignore. Nvidia makes the chips that power much of modern AI. The US had cleared sales of H200 chips, Nvidia processors used for AI systems, to around 10 Chinese firms, but no deliveries had happened. Approval matters only when chips ship.
Washington wants to limit China’s access to the strongest AI chips, because those chips help build stronger AI systems. Beijing wants access, because weaker chips slow its progress and raise its costs. Nvidia sits between the two governments, with one controlling exports and the other controlling demand. Huang was there because AI power is tied to what governments allow companies to sell.
China had its own card to play. Rare earths, minerals used in chips, batteries and electronics, had become part of the bargaining. Trump and Xi were expected to discuss extending a truce while Chinese curbs were still affecting supply and pushing prices higher. AI needs data centres, chips and power, which still depend on physical materials.
Cook and Musk had their own stakes. Cook has built Apple around a deep Chinese manufacturing base. Musk has Tesla’s Shanghai factory, Chinese customers and battery supplies at stake. He also has an AI company competing in a market where Chinese labs are moving fast.
The missing names were revealing too. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, was in Oakland as the OpenAI trial neared its end. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was not reported as part of the delegation, after White House talks in April 2026 over the company’s Mythos model. The visit’s public face was the people controlling the machinery around the AI race.
