United States President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping are set to meet in Washington, DC on Thursday for talks expected to cover trade, artificial intelligence, Taiwan and the US-Israel war on Iran. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington had proposed an AI notification mechanism, effectively a hotline for alerting each other to AI incidents that threaten national security. The summit comes as leading AI companies warn about the technology’s risks and both countries accelerate their competition. The United States has a substantial infrastructure lead, accounting for nearly three-quarters of global AI computing power versus just more than 14 percent for China, according to Epoch AI. Nvidia accounts for more than 60 percent of global AI computing capacity among major chip designers, while Huawei’s share is smaller but growing. The US has more than 5,400 data centres and 84 dedicated AI data centres, more than the next eight countries combined. US companies have led frontier AI models, but Chinese systems are approaching them in performance and dominate OpenRouter’s usage rankings, partly because they are cheaper and often open-weight, allowing developers to download, adapt and run them. Goldman Sachs estimates US hyperscalers will spend about $764bn on AI-related infrastructure in 2026, compared with $102bn for China’s major hyperscalers. China’s spending is projected to grow faster, while it produces more AI research and trains more top researchers. China accounted for more than 27 percent of global AI publications in 2024, compared with 12 percent for the US, and 72 percent of top AI researchers educated in China were working in the US, according to MacroPolo.