Xi Opens U.S. State Visit as Huawei, Alibaba and DeepSeek Roll Out New Chips

Huawei brought forward the release of its next AI chip by three quarters. Alibaba unveiled what it called the country's most powerful AI processor. DeepSeek, the startup whose low-cost model unsettled global markets last year, has reportedly lined up the largest known cluster of Huawei chips assembled to date, according to CNBC.

"For Xi, the leverage is not 'we have caught up with you' — it's 'you can't simply technologically choke us off,'" Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said of the message the launches carry into the summit.

Washington has for years restricted China's access to Nvidia's most advanced AI chips and the equipment needed to make them, betting that limiting computing power would keep Chinese AI a generation behind. Silicon Valley executives have also accused Chinese AI companies of "distillation" — training models on the output of more advanced U.S. systems — a claim Beijing rejects.

George Chen, partner and chair of the digital practice at Washington-based policy consultancy The Asia Group, said the timing of the flagship releases ahead of the leaders' summit was deliberate. "Xi's confidence level in terms of how great China is in terms of technology and innovation is at a historic high," Chen said. "You need to have cards when you sit at a table, and Xi has many cards."

Xi's visit to the White House is his first in 11 years and follows Trump's state visit to Beijing in May. The clustering of announcements in the days before the summit has revived debate over whether China's AI industry has reached an inflection point.

Chris Miller, a Tufts University professor and author of "Chip War," said China has a history of announcing new projects around meetings with senior policymakers to show that Chinese firms are catching up. U.S. models remain ahead on technical benchmarks and profitability, he said, noting that American companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI generate 50 to 100 times the revenue of comparable Chinese firms.

At its annual Huawei Connect conference last week, Huawei said its Ascent 960DT chip will ship in the first quarter of 2027, three quarters ahead of its original schedule. At the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on Tuesday, Alibaba's chip unit unveiled the Zhenwu V900, which it says triples the performance of its predecessor and will go on sale in early 2027.

"There does seem to be genuine acceleration in its production timeline," Sigrid Wang, an analyst at China-focused Hutong Research, said of Huawei's chip. The clustering of products "gives Xi more examples to point to when arguing that U.S. restrictions can slow China's technological development but have not prevented Chinese companies from finding alternative paths forward," Wang said.

Chinese firms have sought to offset weaker individual chips by linking thousands of them into large clusters over faster connections. The approach has limits. Huawei's latest SuperPoD computing architecture links far fewer processors than originally planned, and each chip still delivers roughly half the compute of Nvidia's. Huawei Chairman Eric Xu has acknowledged the company may not be able to make enough chips to meet domestic demand.

"Chinese chip companies haven't made any groundbreaking progress in the past few years," said Xiaomeng Lu, a director at Eurasia Group. "The fundamental competitive landscape hasn't changed." Miller said Chinese firms remain substantially short of the chips needed to train and deploy advanced models and rely heavily on smuggled chips or access to data centers outside China.

As Trump hosts Xi for a multi-day state visit, neither side appears ready to put chip export controls on the table. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer met Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York over the weekend and set up a formal AI channel for incident warnings, but Greer said explicitly that export controls on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment were not on the agenda.

CNBC reported that the absence of the issue from the summit agenda was described as striking given how often Xi raised export controls with former President Joe Biden. Xi has also not invited a delegation of business executives and tech leaders to the summit, according to media reports. Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Beijing's immediate priorities may lie elsewhere.