Our favorite action hero Donald J. Trump is heading to Beijing, and I keep coming back to the forthcoming comic choreography more than the rather dull press release. The official language of the White House will be padded with all the usual diplomatic upholstery: stability, cooperation, respect, trade, agriculture, aviation, dialogue, the kind of vocabulary that arrives pre-ironed, wrinkle-free and already half dead. The dance routine is where the real bargain starts. Trump wants more than anything else the visible proof of strength. Xi Jinping, who has had years to observe the orange man, knows that strength for Trump is never only policy. It is scale, deference, numbers, cameras, applause, shiny and shady gold presents, ceremony, and the feeling that history has briefly put on a bowtie and turned toward him; the man of the art of the deal.
China, of course, understands ceremony (duh) because China understands time, and that is already a big big problem for Washington. In 2017, Beijing gave Trump the full state-visit-plus gold card treatment: Forbidden City, opera, banquet, business deals, the polished imperial cosplay of a civilization very happy to remind a rather rude guest that it was building bureaucracy while Europe and the US were still arguing with mud. Trump brought the family theatre too, showing Xi a cute video of Arabella Kushner singing in Mandarin and reciting classical Chinese poetry, which Chinese state media turned into the softest kind of diplomatic sugar. Absolutely none of that was accidental of course: Beijing placed Trump inside a golden cage and let his ego do the flattering.
That kind of smooth talk matters because Trump keeps telling us it matters. At Busan last October, he called Xi “a friend of mine” and “a great leader of a great country”. Ahead of this trip, he said he respects Xi and hopes Xi respects him. He expects “a rather big hug”. The sentence sounds small and childish for a world leader, until you remember that Trump’s politics has always run on raw recognition hunger. He wants to be feared by enemies, admired by allies, envied by rivals, and treated by other strong leaders as a man who also belongs in the strong-leader enclosure. Xi does not need to seduce him with crude praise. He can offer him the heavier drug: the impression that two exceptional men can bypass the clutter of institutions and settle the future over tea, tariffs and mutual regard. Amongst friends, way above the plebs.
The Beijing he visits now has very little in common with the 2017 version he vaguely remembers, other than the flags and the talent for polished surfaces. Xi is more dug in, more confident, more ideologically armored, and surrounded by a relentless industrial machine that has spent the last decade learning where everyone else hurts. China has economic problems, yes, including debt, access to oil, demographics, property rot and youth unemployment, but it also has a terrifyingly practical talent for turning western dependency into iron leverage. Rare earths. Batteries (the evil is in the details). Solar. Shipbuilding. Industrial scale. The parts of the world that still like to call themselves “advanced economies” can produce exquisite PowerPoints about resilience, and field ambitious business plans, then quietly check whether the magnets, wafers, transformers and machine tools are still coming (and at an affordable price 😊).
Donald J. Trump, meanwhile, arrives needing a win. Reuters framed it almost cruelly: stung by the Iran war, he is heading to China with expectations reduced to beans, beef, Boeing and help from Beijing on Tehran. The grand loud-mouth bully-isch tariff swagger has been softened by humiliating court rulings, retaliation, energy pressure, domestic uproar and a war that has drained attention and approval at home. Dominance becomes harder to sell when the man selling it is also (and mostly) asking for help. He may still walk in with the golden certainty and diapered swag of someone who believes every table is a negotiating table, but this time he is walking toward another man who is painfully aware he needs something.
Iran changes the air around the summit. The U.S. wants China to pressure Tehran and help stabilize the Strait of Hormuz, while China, one of the world’s great energy importers and a major buyer of Iranian oil, knows exactly how useful that request can become. Roughly half of China’s crude passes through Hormuz, which gives Beijing a genuine reason to care about de-escalation, but also a reason to price its cooperation carefully. Xi does not have to save Trump. He only has to make help feel available, conditional and civilized. That is how leverage often arrives: wearing a calm face and asking whether there are other matters we might discuss. Remember Zelinsky being yelled at in the Oval Golden Office for not having the best cards in hand? That sinking feeling.
Taiwan sits underneath all of this like a relentless chess clock that nobody can stop hear ticking. Trump says he will discuss Taiwan arms sales with Xi, and his administration has announced a $11 billion weapons package for the island, the largest ever. That sounds firm and manly and all that, and in the obvious public sense he may well stay steady. He has Congress, China hawks, defense planners, allies, the Taiwan Relations Act and volatile markets pressing against any attempt to treat Taipei as just another invoice line in another mangled deal. The danger lives elsewhere, in his timing, bungled delivery, improvised emphasis, licenses, communiqués and way to many verbs (the biggest verbs). Beijing does not need Trump to announce that Taiwan has been abandoned. A softer, subtle phrase, a minor delay, a gesture against high-level visits, a future promise about arms sales, or a understated shift from “does not support Taiwan independence” toward “opposes Taiwan independence” would already be extremely valuable to Xi. Diplomacy is full of words that look harmless to people who never have to live beneath the missiles attached to them, and we all know how considerate, tender, cautious and gracious Trump is with words.
This is where Chris Miller’s Chip War remains essential. Miller’s book does not let the reader float away into software fantasy. It drags the entire digital age back to fabs, masks, wafers, chemicals, lithography, engineers, choke points and islands. Semiconductors, in his telling, are the foundation of economic, military and geopolitical power, and Taiwan is the horrifying center of gravity. Taiwan’s TSMC produces about 90 percent of the world’s most advanced processor chips, while Taiwanese companies produce more than a third of the new computing power the world adds each year. Call it a supply chain if you enjoy rather obvious understatements; I prefer planetary anxiety disorder with a ticking timebomb. Too much power, in one place, just under the left claw of mighty China.
Then there is ASML, the Dutch company making the EUV lithography systems that allow mass production of the worlds most advanced microchips. I know “Dutch lithography monopoly” sounds like the title of a documentary watched by six people and one unusually committed cat, but ASML is one of the few hinges on which the next century swings. They are about the only ones able to produce the hardware that enables the AI-revolution at hand. Advanced chips depend on a handful of companies, in a handful of places, with a handful of tools so complex that replacing them makes “strategic autonomy” sound like a nudist wellness retreat for overstressed procurement directors. Europe (still) has a hand on the ASML cradle and the facial expression of someone carrying a violin through a riot police water canon charge. Very cultured. Very exposed.
Miller’s oil comparison still works because the twentieth century ran through wells, pipelines, refineries, OPEC-policies, tankers and petrostates, while this century is increasingly being routed through fabs, packaging plants, memory stacks, data centers and precious electricity grids. The worrying twist is that the AI boom has added yet another choke point on top of the chip war, and that choke point is memory. High-bandwidth memory, HBM, is the thing that lets advanced AI processors breathe. GPUs get the keynote glamour, the leather jackets, the market-cap fever and the religious conversion noises from NVIDIA investors; HBM feeds the beast. Give a racehorse air through an aluminum drinking straw and you have the correct visual for a GPU starved of memory bandwidth.
The U.S. knows this, which is why high-bandwidth memory was pulled into export controls. BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security, the export-control arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce) describes HBM as critical to AI training and inference at scale, and China’s shrewd negotiators know perfectly well why relief on advanced memory matters. China can build some impressive chips. China can smuggle, route, rent and improvise. China can pour subsidies into domestic champions until the spreadsheet needs therapy. Still, frontier AI hates improvisation at the bottleneck. It needs volume, bandwidth, packaging, yield, software, power, and the boring miracle of components arriving at the same time (and on time).
The memory market has become absurd in the way strategic markets often become absurd right before politicians notice them. SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron dominate HBM. SK Hynix led the HBM market last year with 61 percent share, followed by Micron at 20 percent and Samsung at 19 percent. The same AI boom is pulling memory capacity away from ordinary DRAM for phones and PCs, which is why Apple is already warning about rising costs and why the consumer electronics industry is starting to look like it has a headache behind its fake marketing smile. A Reuters report said big tech firms are making unprecedented offers to SK Hynix, including offers to fund production lines and ASML equipment, because available capacity is basically gone. There is desperate, and then there is offering to buy the machines that make the machines so you can get enough memory to feed your machines. Humanity, as usual, has chosen elegance yet again.
The International Energy Agency adds the part that should kill off the fluffy cloud language once and for all. Data-centre electricity consumption is projected to roughly double from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030, with AI-focused data centres growing much faster. An advanced AI rack roughly the size of a large refrigerator could draw peak power equivalent to 65 households by 2027. The more I read these numbers, the less patient I get with executives talking about AI as if it lives in a bright abstract mist somewhere above quarterly earnings. AI lives in substations, transformers, cooling systems, water permits, gas turbines, nuclear plants, batteries, grid queues and municipal meetings where someone eventually has to explain why the future wants the energy appetite of a small suburb and the thirst equivalent of Egypt.
The chip war has become a memory war, and the memory war is dragging energy behind it by the collar. The Middle East now matters to AI not only through oil prices and geopolitics, but through shipping, energy security, industrial inputs and the mood of capital markets that have to fund the next absurd wave of data-center construction. Iran was supposed to be a foreign-policy theatre for Trump; instead it has become a constraint on his China bargaining position. He goes to Beijing needing help on Tehran while also trying to hold the line on Taiwan, trade, chips, rare earths and advanced memory. That is a lot of knives to juggle when your favorite negotiating tactic is announcing that everyone else is losing… biggly.
Washington is slowly discovering that export controls built for boxes struggle in a world of rented capability. A chip can be stopped at a port, at least in theory, although the smuggling cases through Malaysia and Thailand suggest even that is getting messy. Compute rented through a cloud service in another country is slipperier. Congress has moved on this with the Remote Access Security Act, which would expand export-control authority to remote access and cloud-based exposure of controlled technology (How? No one knows.) The Chip Security Act pushes the same anxiety from another angle, requiring location-verification systems for export-controlled AI chips to detect diversion, smuggling or unauthorized use. The border has moved from the shipping container to your login screen, which is the kind of sentence customs law did not deserve but history has handed it anyway (and a wall along the Mexican border is pretty useless in this.)
China has already answered with its own hardening. Beijing has banned foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers, with early-stage projects reportedly ordered to remove them or cancel purchase plans. It has told chipmakers adding capacity to use at least 50 percent domestically made equipment. It has expanded rare-earth controls, including extra scrutiny for semiconductor users, and China still produces more than 90 percent of the world’s processed rare earths and rare-earth magnets. Beijing chose to inventory the handles of every knife in the drawer.
China’s exports rose 14.1 percent in April, and exports to the U.S. rose 11.3 percent after falling sharply in March. The U.S. goods deficit with China has fallen in relative ranking, with March deficits larger against Taiwan, Vietnam and Mexico, which mostly tells us that dependency has learned to wear a different hat. Supply chains are diversifying, routing, hiding, hedging and occasionally pretending to be independent because someone changed the address on the invoice. Fine. Useful. Necessary. Also nowhere near the clean break overweight politicians imply when they get excited near “fake news” microphones.
The powerplay in Beijing is messy: American technology, Chinese manufacturing, Trump’s craving for visible strength, Xi’s appetite for durable advantage, Taiwan’s impossible centrality, and memory sitting there like the unglamorous little component that suddenly decides who gets to build the future. Trump wants a win he can describe before the cameras: trade relief, energy cooperation, aircraft orders, soybeans, Iran help, a line about peace, a number large enough to bully a headline. Xi wants the things that do not always photograph well: softer Taiwan language, fewer future tech controls, relief on chipmaking equipment and advanced memory, protection for Chinese supply chains, rare-earth leverage kept alive, and enough ceremonial warmth to make Trump feel that the two of them have done something grand.
So will Trump stay firm on Taiwan? Publicly, probably. Institutionally, he is boxed in by more than mood, and even transactional presidents cannot always convert strategy into hotel points. Strategically, I would read the edges rather than the center: whether the arms package moves or merely exists, whether Washington’s wording shifts, whether export controls on HBM remain hard, whether H200 access becomes precedent, whether cloud compute gets regulated or left as useful ambiguity, and whether China receives some quiet promise against future technology restrictions. The betrayal, if there is one, will probably arrive as a soft sentence that both sides can deny for two news cycles.
That is the miserable elegance of this moment. Trump’s Chinese “friend” does not need to defeat him at the table. Xi only needs to let Trump feel strong in public while China collects strength in the machinery underneath. Chips remain the new oil, and Chris Miller earned that metaphor the hard way. Memory is now the new gold, because AI does not run on vibes, slogans, investor decks or another dazed man on stage saying intelligence will be abundant. It runs on HBM, EUV, rare earths, electricity, Taiwan, water, law, shipping and political nerve.
Gold, of course, used to be the new black. Fashion always gets there before strategy, mostly because fashion admits it is absurd.
The rest of us are left with the machinery. An aging president who needs respect. A chairman who understands patience. An tiny island that makes the world’s most important chips. A memory famine hiding behind the GPU glamour. A grid being asked to feed the machines. A Europe clutching ASML like a family heirloom during an evacuation. And a global economy still pretending that the cloud is somewhere above us, when the truth is under our feet, humming, heating, drinking water, and waiting for the next strong leader to discover that physics does not care how the handshake looked.
