Trump’s China trip, and the tech chiefs behind it

A week of market whiplash

Jensen Huang’s trip to China was already being cast as a corporate parable before the conversation had properly left the week’s headline churn. The opening recap moves fast, from Cerebras’s debut to Amazon’s shopping assistant revamp, but the point is less the individual announcements than the speed at which the tech market keeps rewriting its own rules. By the time the talk turns to OpenAI’s courtroom fight, the frame is set: capital, law, and geopolitics are all being pulled by the same force.

This was the week of the first trip to China by an American president in nine years. Trump left with a group of CEOs from the main American companies, and especially a large group of CEOs from the main American tech companies.

Cerebras Systems, a chip design company and a direct competitor to Nvidia, completed the largest U.S. tech IPO since Snowflake. The stock closed its first session at $311, up 68 percent.

Google Cloud will hire hundreds of forward-deployed engineers to go physically inside companies and help them integrate its products. The bet here is that the real bottleneck in AI adoption is no longer model capacity, but the integration of those systems inside firms.

That same uncertainty runs through the OpenAI trial, which the conversation treats as more than a legal dispute. Elon Musk is asking for more than $150 billion, on the claim that OpenAI took that value when it converted from nonprofit to for-profit, and he is also pressing to remove Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from leadership. If that sounds like a business fight, it also reads like an attempt to force a reset of the company’s ownership story.

The accusation asks OpenAI to repay a sum greater than 150 billion dollars, which, from Elon Musk’s point of view, was stolen from the company when it decided to convert from a nonprofit to a for-profit company.

This week the trial ends, so starting Monday the jury will begin to evaluate the case and give its opinion to the judge, who in this case will have full discretion over the final decision.

OpenAI’s case could reset AI

The most revealing line in the Musk v. OpenAI trial is not about fraud or betrayal. It is about structure: who owns the model, the chips, the infrastructure, and the know-how, and who ends up as a thin layer over someone else’s stack. Satya Nadella, in an internal 2022 email, warned Microsoft against becoming the next IBM, buying access to someone else’s technology while another company captured the real control.

What I want is to own everything, the chips, the infrastructure, the foundational model, and the know-how. Right now, we run the risk of being just a layer over chips, and we do not have the IP in OpenAI’s hands.

We are running the same risk, because if we keep investing in and using OpenAI’s software, tomorrow OpenAI could become the new Microsoft and we could end up becoming IBM.

That fear cuts both ways. Nadella’s memo was a case for owning the full machine, yet he also floated the opposite conclusion, that it might be better to be an investor and avoid the execution risk. The contradiction matters because it mirrors the wider AI tradeoff: firms want control, but they also want exposure without the burden of building everything themselves.

The legal case itself could force a much harsher accounting. Musk’s side is seeking more than $150 billion, arguing that OpenAI improperly enriched itself when it converted from a nonprofit into a for-profit structure, and wants Sam Altman and Greg Brockman removed from leadership. If that claim prevailed, the company’s commercial arm could be dismantled and the licensing deals tied to Microsoft’s Azure business would be thrown into doubt.

The main immediate consequence would be the dismantling of the for-profit structure built around the nonprofit, a return to OpenAI’s origins and the dissolution of the commercial arm where all the investments were made.

That commercial arm is also where the proprietary IP licensing agreements sit, especially with Satya Nadella’s company, so Azure’s AI business would basically lose those licenses.

The CEOs follow the geopolitics

By the time the conversation turns from OpenAI’s courtroom drama to the China trip, the point is already clear: the real action is no longer only inside the companies, but in the geopolitical weather around them. Musk, the speakers suggest, is physically absent from the trial because he is on the other side of the world, on Trump’s plane to China, and that image becomes the bridge to a bigger story about where corporate power now travels.

Musk is far from the courtroom. He had to take Air Force One with Trump to go to China, and maybe this is the ideal segment that launches us into the second story of the week.

We’re focusing on the part that delights our community, the great figures of business. Did you see this parade?

The delegation is presented less as a diplomatic curiosity than as a map of dependency. Larry Fink, David Solomon, Jensen Huang and Tim Cook are not there because business has escaped politics, but because their businesses are already entangled with it, from finance to chips to consumer hardware. The speakers frame the trip as a school trip for American capital, a corporate entourage orbiting a presidential meeting that will matter far beyond the photographs.

We’re talking about the fact of the week, of the decade, the trip, the meeting, the school trip, I’d call it that, of the Americans in China.

There were the great figures of finance, and naturally also from the technology world.

That vulnerability is visible in the way the speakers treat Nvidia. Jensen Huang appears in the same frame as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio in a jokingly diplomatic post, but the joke lands because his company sits at the center of the U.S.-China tech standoff. A chip chief can be photographed beside politicians, yet his real leverage depends on what Washington allows him to sell and what Beijing still wants to buy.

China and America meet in hardware

The Chinese and American executives in Beijing were not sitting down as equals, Simone Pieranni argued. That was the point of the spectacle around them: , but the corporate actors arrived with a more awkward mix of dependence, rivalry, and mutual need.

It is very interesting because, in my view, it marks a difference between the diplomatic posture of China and the behavior of Chinese companies compared with their American counterparts.

For BYD and Tesla, the relationship is perhaps the most balanced, because BYD controls the whole supply chain and recently has been able to compete with Tesla across the board, in some cases even winning.

Pieranni’s reading was that this balance looks different depending on the company. BYD, he said, can meet Tesla from a stronger footing because it controls more of its own stack. Huawei, by contrast, sits in a more paradoxical place: U.S. sanctions hurt it, but they also forced it to become more resilient.

I imagine a meeting between CEOs in which Jensen Huang is, of course, the star, but Huawei’s people feel that, thanks perhaps also to the United States, they have increased their own capabilities and are closing in on Huawei in an incredible way.

In the relationship between American and Chinese companies, we have all the interlacing that is part of the larger economic and commercial conflict between China and the United States.

That interlacing was the real subject. Pieranni said Chinese tech leaders once looked at the U.S. as a model to imitate, even a country to admire, but now they see a competitor they can sometimes match or surpass. The point was not that the old hierarchy has vanished, only that it has become unstable.

Jensen Huang’s three-way game

Jensen Huang keeps being described here as a man in three places at once. In Washington, he is the head of a national champion. In Beijing, he is the supplier that still matters. In Taipei, he is the founder whose company sits inside the island’s strategic anxiety. The argument in this stretch is that Huang’s power comes from that split, and so does the suspicion around him.

In the United States, there is an anti-China faction that sees competition with China as existential. Trump’s approach is different, it was also represented alongside David Sacks as an AI adviser, and it is about trading, even with the Chinese rival.

Jensen Huang seems to me to be playing a three-way game: in the United States he is American, in China he is Chinese, in Taiwan he is Taiwanese. Wherever he goes, he plays the part of the person in front of him.

Aresu’s point is that the real fight has been running since 2022, when U.S. export controls began tightening and China started treating Nvidia’s chips as a dependency to be reduced. He described a loop in which Washington limits sales, Beijing absorbs weaker hardware where it can, and the pressure feeds the effort to build a domestic alternative around Huawei, Cambricon, and others. That is why the relationship stays unstable: each restriction creates both a business opportunity and a strategic reaction.

The Americans first limit the ability to export to China. China takes it badly and starts importing lower-quality chips, but still fundamental for them, the famous H20 chips.

These limits then become the main spur for Huawei to give the Chinese a bit of independence and strategic autonomy when it comes to chips.