On the other side of the chip coin are foreign data centers, which have largely escaped Washington’s attention. That may soon change, too. Lawmakers in Congress have been pushing for tighter limits on Chinese companies’ renting computing power abroad, whether from U.S.-owned data centers or facilities running American chips.
This month, the U.S. firm Oracle canceled a roughly $7 billion contract that gave Tencent, a Chinese company, access to advanced A.I. chips in data centers in Southeast Asia, after U.S. officials raised concerns, according to The Financial Times. In 2027, U.S. cloud giants like Microsoft and Amazon could face similar scrutiny for hosting open-weight models from Chinese labs such as Moonshot and Z.ai, said Paul Triolo, partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, a global advisory firm.
If the U.S. further restricts access to chips, China would probably retaliate by restricting access to rare earths and the powerful magnets made from them, which go into products as varied as electric vehicles and fighter jets. “We’re sort of on the brink here,” Triolo said. “If the Chinese escalate further on rare-earths export controls, we’re in uncharted territory.”
2. Does China further barricade its tech economy?
In Shenzhen, U.S. tech executives will probably press for more leniency for their companies in China. On the whole, observers said, they’re unlikely to get it. In May, Bloomberg reported that China had begun requiring senior A.I. researchers and executives at private firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek to get approval before traveling abroad, with some surrendering their passports. The authorities also barred the two Chinese founders of Manus, an A.I. start-up based in Singapore, from leaving China after the company was acquired by Meta, then ordered Meta to unwind the deal.
This month, Chinese regulators blocked SoftBank’s $5.4 billion acquisition of a robotics firm on national security grounds. And China’s own export control list — which includes not just rare earths but also batteries and industrial machinery related to solar panels and tunnel boring — is lengthening.
