Huawei and Alibaba Chip Blitz Arms Xi With Leverage Ahead of Trump Summit

Huawei has pulled the release of its next AI chip forward by three quarters, landing days before Xi Jinping's first White House state visit in 11 years and handing the Chinese president a concrete argument against tighter U.S. export controls: Washington can slow China's AI ambitions, but it cannot stop them.

The launch is part of a coordinated run of announcements from China's national technology champions. At its annual Huawei Connect conference last week, Huawei said its Ascent 960DT will ship in the first quarter of 2027 — three quarters ahead of its original schedule. A day later, at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on Tuesday, Alibaba's chip unit unveiled the Zhenwu V900, which the company says triples the performance of its predecessor and goes on sale in early 2027. Alibaba is calling it the country's most powerful AI processor.

DeepSeek, the startup whose low-cost model rattled global markets last year, has reportedly lined up the largest known cluster of Huawei chips built to date.

The timing is no accident, according to analysts tracking the summit. Xi's visit to the White House — his first in 11 years — follows Trump's state visit to Beijing in May. The flagship releases, arriving days ahead of the leaders' meeting, have revived debate over whether China's AI industry has hit an inflection point.

"You can't choke us off"

The stakes for the summit are clear. Washington has spent years restricting China's access to Nvidia's most advanced AI chips and the equipment needed to make them, betting that starving Beijing of computing power would keep Chinese AI a generation behind American systems. 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.

The new launches sharpen Beijing's counterargument: that those restrictions have limits.

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

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

Chris Miller, a Tufts University professor and author of "Chip War," offered a more skeptical reading. China has a history of announcing new projects around meetings with senior policymakers, he said, as part of an effort to show Chinese firms are "catching up." And catch up they have not, by his measure: U.S. models remain ahead on technical benchmarks and profitability. American firms like Anthropic and OpenAI make 50 to 100 times the revenue of comparable Chinese firms, Miller said.

Slowed, but not stopped

Beneath the summit choreography sits a real shift in China's production timeline. Sigrid Wang, an analyst at China-focused Hutong Research, said there "does seem to be genuine acceleration" in Huawei's chip production schedule. The clustering of chips into large computing clusters, Wang said, "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."

Chinese firms have sought to compensate for weaker individual chips by linking thousands of them into large clusters over faster connections. DeepSeek's reported Huawei chip cluster is the most prominent example of that strategy at scale.

But the approach has hard 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. Chairman Eric Xu acknowledged two constraints: Huawei may not be able to make enough chips to meet domestic demand, and Chinese AI developers may not be advanced enough yet to experience rogue safety risks.

"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 put the dependency in starker terms. 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. "China is still highly dependent on the U.S. for advanced chips," he said.

That dependency is the reason the stakes of this summit extend beyond a single state dinner. If Beijing can demonstrate genuine progress toward self-sufficiency in AI compute, Washington's central policy lever against Chinese AI weakens — and the debate over whether to tighten or relax export controls changes shape. If the progress is cosmetic, the current restrictions retain their force.

Export controls off the table

For now, neither side appears ready to test that question. As Trump hosts Xi for a multi-day state visit, chip export controls are not on the agenda.

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 up for discussion.

"It's striking to see the chip export control issue not come up at these summits given how often Xi brought them up with Biden," Chan said. The Chinese president has also not invited a delegation of business executives and tech leaders to the summit, according to media reports.

Beijing's immediate priorities may lie elsewhere. Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Xi is likely to press Trump to align closer on the Taiwan issue. In return, the Chinese leader may offer help on Iran, including restoring free movement of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

That leaves the tech rivalry in a holding pattern — with Washington's export control regime intact, Beijing's chip workarounds accelerating, and neither leader willing to spend summit capital on the issue. The Ascent 960DT and Zhenwu V900 both ship in early 2027, which means the next concrete test of whether China's cluster strategy can close the compute gap with Nvidia will arrive after the diplomatic calendar has moved on. As Lee put it: "The recalibration of U.S.-China tech relations takes a lot of substantial work. Not a summit deliverable, I am afraid — at least not this time."