Trump and his CEOs want China’s business – but has Asia moved on?

The US delegation went to Beijing looking for deals, but a ‘super cycle’ of capital expenditures across Asia is already fuelling enormous growth.

There is a particular species of optimism that attaches itself to grand diplomatic entrances. When a motorcade of black SUVs swept through Zhongnanhai’s red-lacquered gates last week carrying some of the most powerful executives in American capitalism — the heads of Apple, Nvidia, BlackRock, Tesla, and more than a dozen other corporate empires — it carried with it an unmistakable whiff of that optimism. Deals would be struck. Tariffs would soften. A new chapter of profitable engagement would begin.

Then Beijing spoke — not with a roar, but with the studied composure of a party that no longer needs to prove anything. President Xi Jinping received the delegation warmly. Communiqués were issued. Smiles were photographed. And then, underneath all the diplomatic theatre, the harder reality reasserted itself: Asia has been building its own future, and it has been doing so at a pace that makes American corporate courtship feel, at times, like arriving fashionably late to a party that peaked three years ago.

This is not decoupling. It is something subtler and, in many ways, more consequential — a reorientation of economic gravity so gradual that Washington’s political class has barely noticed, even as its most celebrated business leaders quietly scrambled to stay relevant.

The Delegation and What It Wanted

The composition of the US business delegation that accompanied President Donald Trump to Beijing for his first formal summit with Xi since returning to the White House was itself a kind of argument. Reuters reported a cohort of roughly 17 chief executives, a number that had Washington observers reaching for historical comparisons: it was reminiscent, in scale if not in spirit, of Nixon’s 1972 entourage of industrialists and strategists. Among them were Tim Cook of Apple, whose sprawling Chinese manufacturing ecosystem remains stubbornly difficult to replicate elsewhere; Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who came bearing a very specific anxiety about export controls and their effect on his company’s access to the world’s most voracious AI-chip market; Larry Fink of BlackRock, whose firm has been quietly expanding its asset management footprint in China; and Elon Musk, who occupies the curious position of being simultaneously the world’s most prominent American entrepreneur and one with his deepest manufacturing roots in Shanghai.

What did they want? The list was long and surprisingly familiar. A relaxation of semiconductor export restrictions — or at least a more predictable licensing regime — topped Huang’s agenda. Cook wanted reassurance on supply chain continuity and, more discreetly, progress on Apple’s stalled discussions about iPhone distribution in a market where Huawei’s domestic revival has been eating into its market share with uncomfortable speed. Fink wanted market access liberalisation in financial services. The aerospace contingent — Boeing’s representatives attended in an advisory capacity — hoped for progress on the 50-odd 737 MAX aircraft China has ordered but not yet accepted. And hovering above every conversation was the question of rare earth export controls, which China had quietly weaponised in early 2026 as a counterpunch to American chip restrictions, with effects rippling through defence and clean-energy supply chains from Detroit to Stuttgart.

Key items on the US delegation’s agenda · Beijing, May 2026

Agenda Item	Companies Involved
Semiconductor export control reform	Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel
Rare earth / critical minerals access	Auto, Defence, Energy sectors
Boeing aircraft deliveries	~50 MAX units outstanding
Financial services market access	BlackRock, Goldman, JPMorgan
Tariff schedule renegotiation	25–145% on Chinese goods
Apple supply chain assurances	Tim Cook / Apple

The outcomes, at least as disclosed, were modest. A framework for “ongoing technical dialogue” on chip licensing. A vague endorsement of expanded cultural and student exchanges. Beijing’s agreement to review the Boeing deliveries — a process that has been under review, in one form or another, since 2019. The rare earths issue was not resolved so much as deferred, assigned to a working group that will report back at an unspecified future date. For a delegation of this commercial firepower, the haul was thin.

Asia’s Super Cycle: The Numbers Behind the Quiet Revolution

To understand why Beijing felt no particular urgency to make sweeping concessions, one needs to understand the economic context in which these negotiations took place. Across Asia, a capital expenditure super cycle is underway that is, by several measures, the largest coordinated burst of industrial investment since the postwar reconstruction of Japan and Germany.

Morgan Stanley’s Asia economics team has been tracking what it calls “the three-wave supercycle”: a simultaneous surge of investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure, energy transition assets, and strategic industrial capacity. In China alone, fixed-asset investment in high-technology manufacturing grew by more than 15% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, led by data centres, advanced semiconductor fabrication, and electric vehicle battery plants. The numbers are staggering in their aggregation: Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that Chinese technology companies committed over $120 billion in planned capital expenditure for 2026, a figure that, if realised, would exceed the combined annual technology capex of all European Union economies.

“Asia is not waiting for the West to decide what the future looks like. It is building the future’s plumbing — and doing so at a speed that makes Western planning cycles look glacial.”

— Senior economist, Asian Development Bank

But the story extends far beyond China’s borders, and this is the part that Washington’s China-focused analysts have been slowest to absorb. In India, Prime Minister Modi’s Production-Linked Incentive schemes have catalysed over $35 billion in committed manufacturing investment since 2023, with Apple, Samsung, and a constellation of Taiwanese suppliers now running or building facilities in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka that will, within two years, produce a meaningful share of the world’s smartphones. Vietnam — once dismissed as a temporary overflow valve for Chinese manufacturing — is now home to sophisticated electronics assembly operations run by Samsung and Intel that rival, in process complexity, anything in Shenzhen. Malaysia has become a critical node in the global semiconductor back-end supply chain, with OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) capacity expanding at double-digit rates in Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

The Asian Development Bank’s 2026 outlook projects the developing economies of Asia will collectively expand by 4.9% this year, more than three times the forecast pace of the advanced economies. That differential is not new — it has persisted, with interruptions, for four decades. What is new is the quality of that growth: it is increasingly driven not by labour-cost arbitrage but by genuine technological capability, domestic demand, and what the ADB calls “intra-regional economic density.”

The AI Infrastructure Race

Nowhere is the super cycle more visible than in AI infrastructure. China’s hyperscaler companies — Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent, and ByteDance — committed collectively to well over $50 billion in data centre construction in 2025–2026, a response not only to domestic AI demand but to a deliberate strategic choice to build computational sovereignty. The irony for Jensen Huang was not lost on anyone in the room: Nvidia’s export-controlled chips are precisely what Chinese hyperscalers most want and cannot freely buy, and yet the market they are denied access to is building itself anyway, through a combination of Huawei’s Ascend processors, homegrown foundry capacity, and sheer engineering determination.

Meanwhile, across Southeast Asia, a parallel data centre boom is being funded by a mix of sovereign wealth capital — Singapore’s GIC and Temasek have been aggressively co-investing with regional developers — and the US hyperscalers themselves. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have each announced multi-billion dollar regional expansions in 2025 and 2026 in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. This creates a fascinating paradox: American technology companies are simultaneously lobbying Washington for China market access while building out an alternative Asian technology ecosystem that could, over time, reduce the strategic significance of any single country’s approval.

Asia capex super cycle — selected commitments, 2025–2026

Indicator	Figure	Trend
China tech fixed-asset investment growth (Q1 2026)	+15.4% YoY	↑
China hyperscaler data centre capex (2026 est.)	$50–60bn	↑
India PLI manufacturing commitments (since 2023)	$35bn+	↑
ASEAN semiconductor capex (Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand)	$28bn (2026)	↑
Intra-Asian FDI flows (2025)	$620bn	↑ +18%
Asia-Pacific renewables investment (2026 est.)	$820bn	↑

Has Asia Moved On? The Evidence of Diversification

The question embedded in the title of this piece deserves a careful answer — because it is easy to overstate the case. Asia has not moved on from the United States. American capital, technology, and consumer demand remain structurally significant to nearly every economy in the region. The bilateral trade relationship between the US and China alone, despite tariffs reaching 145% on certain goods categories by mid-2026, was still tracking at over $550 billion annually — an astonishing testament to how difficult it is to disentangle two economies that spent thirty years deliberately weaving themselves together.

But “moved on” is perhaps the wrong frame. What has happened is more like what a good portfolio manager does when one asset becomes volatile: you don’t sell it entirely, you reweight. Asia has been quietly, systematically reweighting away from US-dependent growth models and toward structures that are resilient to American policy volatility.

Consider the evidence at the trade level. WTO trade statistics show that intra-Asian trade — commerce between and among the economies of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia — has grown to represent approximately 58% of Asia’s total trade flows, up from roughly 50% a decade ago. RCEP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that came into full effect in 2022, has quietly become one of the world’s most consequential free trade frameworks, lowering barriers across a bloc representing nearly a third of global GDP. Its institutional architecture is distinctly Asian, and conspicuously absent of American participation.

At the investment level, the picture is equally striking. The concept of “friendshoring” — originally a US policy idea about redirecting supply chains toward allies — has been enthusiastically adopted by Asian capital markets, but with a different roster of “friends.” JPMorgan’s regional research team documented in its 2026 outlook that intra-Asian foreign direct investment hit a record $620 billion in 2025, with Chinese, Singaporean, South Korean, and Japanese capital flowing into Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines at unprecedented volumes. The US is a participant in this story, but it is no longer the protagonist.

The Geopolitical Premium on Self-Sufficiency

Perhaps the most enduring consequence of the 2018–2026 era of US–China trade conflict has been to confer enormous political legitimacy on self-sufficiency as an economic virtue. In China, the “dual circulation” strategy — prioritising domestic consumption and homegrown innovation as the primary growth engine, with international trade as a supplementary circuit — has moved from theoretical framework to practical imperative. The result is a Chinese economy that is genuinely less dependent on American final demand than it was a decade ago, even if the adjustment has not been painless.

In Southeast Asia, the effect has been subtler but real. Governments from Jakarta to Hanoi have become acutely aware of their own leverage in a world where both the United States and China are competing for supply-chain relationships. Vietnam, which simultaneously manufactures for Apple and maintains a carefully managed relationship with Beijing, has elevated the art of strategic ambiguity to a high form. Its economy grew 6.8% in 2025, and its trade surplus — achieved simultaneously with China, the United States, and the European Union — is a masterclass in not choosing sides.

“Vietnam has mastered what I’d call the double hedge: exporting to the US while importing from China while maintaining formal neutrality. It is, in the jargon of finance, a pure alpha play on geopolitical volatility.”

— Regional strategist, Singapore-based family office

Implications: For US Firms, Investors, and the Supply Chain

What does all this mean for the 17 chief executives who flew back from Beijing with their goodwill communiqués and their working-group assignments? Several things, not all of them comfortable.

First, the window of maximum US leverage in Asia may have already passed. The Trump administration’s tariff strategy was predicated, implicitly, on the idea that American market access was a prize valuable enough to extract substantial concessions. That premise was always debatable; it is now actively eroding. Chinese companies have spent four years finding alternative markets for their exports — in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa — and they have had considerable success. The marginal value of American market access, while still significant, is declining.

Second, for companies like Nvidia, the export control regime has a structural irony embedded within it. By restricting access to the most advanced American chips, Washington has accelerated — rather than arrested — China’s domestic semiconductor ambitions. Semiconductor Industry Association data suggests Chinese companies are on track to achieve meaningful domestic capability in certain legacy and mid-range chip segments within three to five years. The market Huang wants to sell into today may look fundamentally different in 2030.

Third, for investors, the Asian super cycle presents genuine opportunities that are independent of US–China diplomatic weather. The energy transition investment wave across the region — solar, battery storage, green hydrogen, grid modernisation — is being driven by domestic policy mandates and falling technology costs that no tariff schedule can easily arrest. Morgan Stanley’s Asian equity strategists have been advocating overweight positions in regional utilities, industrial conglomerates, and technology infrastructure names precisely because their growth drivers are endogenous to Asian development, not contingent on Washington’s mood.

For supply chain managers, meanwhile, the lesson of this decade is uncomfortable simplicity: there is no clean alternative to Asia. Attempts to nearshore or reshore manufacturing to the United States have produced some success stories — semiconductor fabrication in Arizona, some pharmaceutical production in North Carolina — but the broader ambition of reducing Asian dependency has largely collided with the reality of skill concentrations, infrastructure depth, and supplier ecosystems that took thirty years to build and cannot be replicated in five. World Bank analysis of global value chain resilience consistently shows that diversification works best when it operates within Asia, spreading risk across multiple countries in the region, rather than attempting to relocate production back to high-cost Western markets.

The Longer Arc: Interdependence Persists, But the Terms Are Changing

It would be a mistake — a seductive, analytically convenient mistake — to conclude from all of this that the US and Asia are drifting into permanent estrangement. The sinews of economic connection are too numerous, too profitable, and too deeply embedded in the interests of too many powerful parties on both sides for anything as dramatic as genuine decoupling to occur in any foreseeable timeframe.

What is changing is the terms of interdependence. For most of the post-Cold War era, Asia’s integration with the global economy was mediated primarily through American institutional frameworks — the dollar, American capital markets, American technology platforms, American security guarantees. Each of these anchors is still present, but each is facing more competition than at any point since 1945. The renminbi’s share of global trade finance has been growing steadily. Asian capital markets — particularly Singapore, Hong Kong (complications notwithstanding), and increasingly Mumbai — are developing genuine depth. Huawei, BYD, and a cohort of Chinese technology companies have demonstrated that it is possible to build world-class products without American intellectual property at their core.

The delegation of CEOs that arrived in Beijing was, in a sense, a proxy for a larger question that American business is only beginning to fully internalise: in a world where Asia is no longer simply a manufacturer for the West but an increasingly self-contained economic ecosystem with its own capital, its own technology, and its own aspirations, what role does American corporate presence play? As a partner? A vendor? Or something awkwardly in between?

Asia GDP growth forecasts, 2026

Economy	Forecast
Developing Asia (ADB aggregate)	+4.9%
India	+6.7%
Vietnam	+6.5%
Indonesia	+5.2%
ASEAN-6 average	+5.1%
China	+4.6%

Forward Outlook

The Beijing summit will likely be remembered not for any single deal struck but for what it revealed about the current state of play: a United States still commanding enormous financial and technological leverage, but deploying it in a theatre where the audience has learned to produce its own entertainment. Asia’s capital expenditure super cycle is not a rebuke of American engagement — it is, in part, a product of it, born from decades of technology transfer, investment, and integration. But it is now mature enough to sustain itself on its own terms.

For investors, the implication is to stop treating “Asia” as a mirror of American risk appetite and start treating it as a source of endogenous growth with its own distinct cycle. For policymakers, the implication is more uncomfortable: leverage that is not exercised at the moment of maximum advantage tends to depreciate. And for the 17 CEOs on that motorcade — men who built their empires partly on the assumption of an infinitely expanding global market — the implication may be the most clarifying of all: the future of growth is in Asia, but Asia, increasingly, is deciding on whose terms.