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Does Xi Need Trump?

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Liz Wolfe | 5.12.2026 9:30 AM

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(Daniel Torok/The White House/Newscom)

Xi and DeepSeek: Chinese artificial intelligence giant DeepSeek has now been optimized to run on Huawei-produced chips, reducing any possible dependence on U.S. products. Announcements last month indicate that DeepSeek is spending way less on chips than American counterparts OpenAI and Anthropic.

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But it's "the timing of DeepSeek's announcement—before this week's scheduled summit between President [Donald] Trump and Xi Jinping, China's leader—[that] gives Beijing fresh confidence entering trade talks that U.S. export controls on Nvidia chips have not derailed China's A.I. development," per The New York Times. Trump and Xi are meeting this week to discuss tariffs and trade, among other things, so China's reliance or lack thereof is especially relevant right now. That said, it's possible that access to U.S. chips was necessary for DeepSeek to get to this place: There's suspicion that DeepSeek's models were trained using Nvidia chips before developing reliance on Huawei chips later on.

"Two months after his last meeting with Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump granted Nvidia permission to sell the H200, one of its most powerful chips, to China," notes the Times. "But since then, those chips have been squeezed between lawmakers in........

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