Investors to Trump and Xi: Keep AI Out of the Trade War

By Hector Herrera | May 13, 2026

As Donald Trump and Xi Jinping prepare to meet, global fund managers are sending an unusually direct message to both governments: don't touch AI. According to reporting from The Japan Times, investors are pressing both sides to treat AI infrastructure as neutral economic ground — arguing that another round of targeted chip export controls or cloud service restrictions would destabilize AI-driven valuations across global markets.

The Investor Calculation

AI has become load-bearing for equity markets. The companies at the center of AI development — Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic's backers, and dozens of infrastructure suppliers — represent a large enough share of global market capitalization that disruptions to their operating environment move indices, not just individual stocks.

Fund managers aren't being idealistic. They're doing math. AI-driven valuations are priced on assumptions about uninterrupted access to compute supply chains, open cloud markets, and continued investment flows across borders. A trade war that targets chips or cloud services — the two categories that matter most — threatens those assumptions directly.

The concern isn't hypothetical. The 2022-2023 U.S. chip export controls on Nvidia's high-end GPUs to China created immediate market volatility, disrupted supply chain planning across the semiconductor industry, and accelerated China's investment in domestic alternatives like Huawei's Ascend chips. Investors who absorbed those losses don't want a repeat with higher stakes.

What Both Sides Are Being Asked to Do

The ask to the United States is narrow and specific: avoid expanding chip export restrictions into new AI hardware categories, and don't extend restrictions to cloud services (like denying Chinese companies access to U.S.-based model APIs or training infrastructure).

The ask to China is similar in shape: don't retaliate against U.S. cloud providers operating in China, and don't restrict the flow of AI-related investment out of Chinese markets.

Neither ask requires either government to abandon its strategic priorities. What investors are arguing is that AI infrastructure has become sufficiently globalized that weaponizing it hurts the attacker as much as the target — a version of mutually assured economic disruption.

Why This Moment

The timing of this investor message matters. Both the U.S. and Chinese AI ecosystems are at inflection points. U.S. hyperscalers are deploying capital at historic rates — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta collectively committed over $300 billion in AI infrastructure spending for 2025-2026. Chinese AI companies, led by Alibaba, Baidu, and a cluster of well-funded startups, are scaling inference capacity rapidly.

An interruption now — before either ecosystem has fully matured — carries more risk than it would at a later stage. Investors are arguing the window to keep AI out of the geopolitical conflict is narrowing.

What to Watch

Watch what categories, if any, are included in the summit's trade discussions. New restrictions on advanced AI chips — specifically anything in the class of Nvidia's Blackwell architecture or its successors — would be the clearest signal that investors' warnings were not heeded. Conversely, any language in a joint statement acknowledging AI infrastructure as a shared interest would be read as a meaningful concession to this pressure campaign.

Sources: The Japan Times — Investors urge Trump and Xi on AI