Nations are navigating the pressures of the US-China tech rivalry with an adaptive approach of capacity building and tech partnerships
At the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, Chinese Premier Li Qiang reportedly committed to “promote mutually beneficial cooperation and peaceful use of key minerals” and that China would “safeguard the interests of developing countries.”
This shortly followed China’s October 2025 sweeping restrictions on export of rare earths, ahead of the bilateral between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan. While the bilateral in South Korea led to Beijing agreeing to “suspend the global implementation of the expansive new export controls on rare earths and related measures”, it nevertheless underscored China’s willingness to weaponize its outsized dominance in production and refining of critical minerals.
The potential impact on global supply chains and manufacturing operations has been concerning, as China’s October 2025 announcement sought to build on its April 2025 actions, which mandated licenses for export of rare earth alloys, mixtures, and magnets. Moreover, the global scope of implications has been clear, as these two announcements went well beyond China’s December 2024 export ban (on Gallium, Germanium, and Antimony), which was aimed at the US alone.
Such pressures of regulatory compliance and sourcing impediments are prompting other nations to explore adaptive strategies for grappling with the implications of the US-China tech rivalry.
To impede China’s access to American tech components, the Trump administration has built on the precedents of the Biden administration (2021-25), which in turn drew from the previous Trump administration’s (2017-21) use of export controls, and investment screenings. This Trump-Biden-Trump continuity has included a focus on inbound and outbound investments in key tech sectors, limiting China’s access to tech with military applications, addressing the fallout of China’s overcapacity in clean tech, and restricting China’s access to semiconductors for AI applications.
These efforts recently led to Singapore and Malaysia announcing their own regulatory efforts to curb transhipment of US tech components to China. Similarly, in January 2025, Japan and the Netherlands aligned their own export regulations with American mandates on limiting China’s access to chip-making equipment.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s decision to scrap Biden’s tiered approach (i.e. the ‘AI Diffusion Rule’) has led to scramble (under an informal country-by-country approach) among nations seeking American semiconductors.
This approach was apparent during Trump’s visit to the Gulf region in May 2025. During which, Saudi Arabia and the UAE finalised sourcing and investment partnerships with US tech companies, for their own respective AI ambitions.
Whereas, the compliance risks also apply to nations that are seeking to explore alternatives to American technologies. For instance, China’s Huawei Technologies has been exploring export deals (for its Ascend chips) with little success. In May 2025, the Trump administration warned against the use of Huawei’s Ascend 910B and 910C processors, which it deemed to be under existing American export controls as they were “designed or manufactured using US-origin technology.”
However, a closer review of these varied cases of nations navigating the pressures of the US-China tech rivalry reveal a confluence of responses.
In Singapore’s case, its measures to address transshipment of American tech components followed an extensive probe into multiple reports on the role of Singapore-based entities and their links with China. Moreover, Singapore’s compliance came with some caveats, as officials noted that the country had no “legal obligation to enforce the unilateral export controls of other countries” and that it expects businesses to take relevant regulations into account.
Similarly, in the case of Japan and the Netherlands, their announcements to mirror some American export controls only came once Trump assumed office in January 2025. Whereas, last year, the Dutch for instance, reached “a handshake agreement” with Biden officials on limiting maintenance services for chip-making equipment, but reportedly “demurred” after Trump’s election victory.
In the Gulf, American support has been linked to curbing some hedging behavior. For instance, the 2024 partnership between the UAE’s G42 and Microsoft materialized only after “behind-the-scenes negotiations” between the Biden administration and G42, and the Emirati firm divesting from TikTok-parent ByteDance and severing links with Chinese hardware suppliers.
Similarly, the October 2025 approval of Nvidia chips for the UAE followed Trump’s May 2025 visit to Abu Dhabi, which involved an Emirati commitment to safeguard AI technologies “by implementing stringent measures to prevent its diversion”.
Beyond such cases that reflect a confluence of responses, nations are also pursuing an adaptive playbook to overtime reduce import dependencies.
This includes initiatives for domestic capacity building and interlinking innovation ecosystems with likeminded partner nations.
Such an approach is apparent in India’s recent decisions to bolster domestic production and refining capacities for critical minerals. This includes India’s decision to revise royalty rates for key critical minerals (like Graphite), to boost domestic mining. Similarly, New Delhi has approved the USD 815 million, seven-year incentive programme for rare earth magnets.
Such efforts are aimed at harnessing untapped potential, with India reportedly holding the third-largest reserves of rare earths (around 8% of global reserves) – and yet contributing just under 1% of the world’s total mining output. Moreover, these efforts to propel India into the processing and refining realms of the global rare earths value chain are coupled with tech partnerships.
For instance, during PM Narendra Modi’s August 2025 visit to Japan, the two sides finalised the India-Japan Memorandum of Cooperation in the Field of Mineral Resources, for jointly developing processing technologies and investing in exploration, mining and stockpiling critical minerals.
This shortly followed India’s June 2025 endorsement of the G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan. In recent weeks, India has also agreed with Canada to explore supply chain partnerships for critical minerals, and announced a trilateral partnership (with Australia and Canada) on resilient supply chains for critical minerals.
In addition, nations are focusing on cross-pollination between innovation ecosystems to build shared capacities for next-gen technologies.
For instance, the European Union (EU) recently identified avenues for deepening its tech linkages with India. Its Joint Communication on redefining the India-EU agenda seeks to elevate “Technology and Innovation” as a dedicated cooperation track; redefine priority areas under the India-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) to focus on semiconductors and green technologies; and proposes “EU-India Innovation Hubs” and “Blue Valleys” as multi-stakeholder platforms for investment facilitation and cross-sectoral collaboration.
Such a collaborative push was also apparent during UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s October 2025 visit to India. During which, the two sides announced the India–UK Connectivity and Innovation Centre for next-gen telecom propositions and the India–UK Joint Centre for AI for jointly exploring AI propositions in health, climate and fintech.
While such capacity-building and collaborative efforts underscore the realities of the multipolar world, they also highlight an adaptive approach on navigating the implications of the US-China tech rivalry.
Amid pressures of compliance and sourcing impediments that risk solidifying a binary choice between American and Chinese tech propositions, nations are therefore exploring tech partnerships to collectively de-risk over the long term.
Kashish Parpiani is the co-author of ‘America and the Indo-Pacific - Trump and Beyond’ (Routledge, 2021). He is also part of the 2025-26 cohort of the Network for Advanced Study of Technology Geopolitics (NAST) Fellowship at the Takshashila Institution.
With renewed trade tensions under Trump 2.0, US-China tech competition has intensified beyond Biden’s ‘small yard, high fence’ tech policy to now entail global implications.
This month, the Chairman of the US House Select Committee on China objected to recent reports that suggest the Trump administration may permit export of certain AI-relevant chips to China, after initially restricting their sales in April 2025.
While there is no official word from the Trump administration on this supposed policy reversal, the move is reportedly part of the easing of bilateral tensions, including the US freezing some export controls to secure a trade deal with China.
Following bilateral talks in Geneva in May 2025 and London in June 2025, China and the US slashed tariffs on each other (for a period of 90 days) and eased deadlocks over tech issues. The latter primarily included China’s restrictions on critical rare-earth minerals in the face of rising US restrictions on critical tech components (chiefly, semiconductors).
The supposed policy reversal on exporting chips to China (albeit only of less-powerful variants like Nvidia’s H20 chips) has prematurely sparked speculations of a ‘grand bargain’ between China and the US.
However, over the last two US administrations, there has been robust policy continuity and interlinked precedents on stemming China’s tech advances, which have complicated prospects for any major policy reversal.
Under US President Joe Biden (2021-2025), the US not only left in-place Trump-era (2017-21) US tariffs on China (on over USD 300 billion-worth Chinese imports), but also drew from the ‘Trump playbook’ on limiting China’s tech advances.
The approach included export controls to limit flow of tech components to China, barring use of federal funds to purchase Chinese tech equipment, and indicting Chinese tech companies for espionage activities. While the previous Trump administration (2017-21) used these measures primarily against Chinese offerings in the 5G and next-gen telecommunications domain, the Biden administration expanded the scope to also include other technologies.
Under the then US NSA Jake Sullivan’s ‘small yard and high fence’ policy of tech competition with China, the Biden administration not only expanded the ambit of critical technologies, but also adopted more means to limit China’s tech advances.
Notably, the Biden administration hailed the use of export controls as “a new strategic asset in the US and allied toolkit” and surpassed the Trump administration’s tally of Chinese companies added to the US Commerce Department’s ‘Entity List’.
Moreover, the Biden administration widened the ambit of critical technologies to also address China’s “overcapacity” in clean technologies. This included increased tariffs on EVs, Lithium-ion batteries, solar cells, etc.
The Biden administration also focused on the flow of capital in addition to the flow of tech. Biden signed an Executive Order requiring outbound US investors to notify the US Treasury Department in case of investments in key domains like semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI components.
The current Trump administration (2025-present) has demonstrated continuity with its predecessor administration on introducing more means to restrict China’s tech advances.
The Trump administration has complemented the Biden-era focus on outbound investments with similar guidelines for inbound investments.
In February 2025, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on promoting foreign investment while protecting national security. The Trump administration announced that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) will “restrict Chinese investments in strategic US sectors like technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials, and others.” This directive also focused on ownership of farmland in key locations by calling for strengthening CFIUS purview over greenfield investments.
The Trump administration has also built upon Biden-era additions to the Entity List. Its March 2025 addition of over 50 Chinese entities to restrict Beijing’s “ability to acquire and develop high-performance and exascale computing capabilities” for military applications, also included six subsidiaries of Chinese cloud-computing firm Inspur Group, which was added to the Entity List by the Biden administration in 2023.
The Trump administration has also followed through on the Biden administration’s tariffs on Chinese semiconductors (starting January 2025) and the December 2024 ‘Section 301’ probe into Chinese semiconductors used in US consumer products.
Moreover, the focus on semiconductors experienced a fillip following the launch of DeepSeek, which highlighted China’s advances in the AI domain.
In 2022 and 2023, the Biden administration announced restrictions on companies like Nvidia, AMD and Intel on their export of AI-relevant chips to China. However, this left out less-powerful variants (like Nvidia’s H20 series). Then-US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reportedly contemplated action against such variants as well, but eventually backed down.
In April 2025 however, the Trump administration also mandated export licensing requirements for Nvidia’s H20, AMD’s MI308, and any such less-powerful equivalents.
In May 2025, the US Commerce Department also issued letters to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies (like Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA) to stop supplying chip-designing software to China.
This Trump-Biden-Trump continuity on US-China tech competition is now increasingly drawing other nations into the fray.
Even as the Trump administration has recently eased restrictions on US export of Ethane, jet engines, and chip design software to China, the global implications of the US-China tech competition are apparent.
Recently, Malaysia began mandating permits for the export of high-end American AI chips to clamp down against circumvention of restrictions on tech components reaching China.
In March 2025, shortly after the Trump administration announced that it was investigating links between Singaporean entities and Chinese tech companies, Singapore arrested three men involved in re-export of Nvidia chips to China’s DeepSeek.
On Biden-era efforts to level the playing field for US companies (like Lam Research, KLA and Applied Materials) complying with curbs on semiconductor equipment, Trump officials have reportedly continued to engage with Japanese and Dutch officials to seek compliance from their companies (chiefly, Tokyo Electron Ltd. and ASML Holding NV).
Amid the scrutiny on transhipment of American chips, earlier this month, media reports revealed that China’s Huawei Technologies is seeking to ink attractive export deals (for its Ascend 910B and 910C AI chips) with customers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
However, it is unclear whether any such deals have been finalised, possibly in view of the Biden-era precedent of the US predicating investment deals upon partners severing links with Chinese tech suppliers. (Case in point: Microsoft’s investment in G42, UAE)
Even as the US and China now work towards another round of discussions to extend their tariff truce and address other bilateral irritants, the ripple-effects of their tech rivalry are apparent. Nations are now facing the binaries of American and Chinese propositions, with mounting pressures of regulatory compliance, sourcing, and investments for technologies that are increasingly vital for the future of development and governance.