트럼프 행정부의 동맹이 미국이 중국의 AI 및 반도체 부문의 기술 능력을 상당히 과소평가하고 있다고 주장한다.

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Senator Steve Daines, a Montana Republican and one of Trump's closest allies, spent the final days of August moving through Hangzhou and Guangzhou. In a Bloomberg phone interview after the trip, he delivered a message Washington may not want to hear less than two weeks before Trump is expected to meet Xi Jinping in the capital: the US may be underestimating the quality and scale of China's technology and innovation ecosystem.

The trip provided more than briefing-book material. According to the South China Morning Post, citing Chinese local government and company posts, Daines visited Zhejiang University and tech companies including Bota, Rokid, Manycore Tech, and EHang. On August 29, he visited EHang's Guangzhou headquarters with a delegation that included Geng Shuang of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs and US Consul General Pauline Kao. Then he took a flight in the company's EH216-S pilotless eVTOL aircraft.

That detail carries significance. The EH216-S holds the world's first type certificate, production certificate, and standard airworthiness certificate for a pilotless eVTOL issued by China's Civil Aviation Administration. The aircraft is also commercially operated under China's first air operator certificates for human-carrying eVTOL services. Daines was not examining a mockup in a showroom—he was sitting inside one of the clearest signs that China is moving futuristic hardware out of the lab and into regulated use.

The timing amplifies the message. The AP reported this week that China and the US are working toward reciprocal tariff reductions that could align with the Trump-Xi meeting scheduled for September 24 in Washington. Bloomberg has reported that US officials have kept expectations modest for that meeting, with trade, compliance, and technology restrictions all in play. The sharper point is this: a senator close to Trump just returned from China saying the technology gap may be smaller than Washington assumes.

Beijing has placed Cambricon and Huawei on its first-ever government AI chip procurement list while pouring billions into SMIC, even as Washington drafts a ban on Chinese data center hardware. Cambricon's stock has become mainland China's most expensive as Nvidia loses ground.

Daines did not need to visit a fabrication plant to make his point. The chip data already existed. Reuters reported this week that Huawei and Cambricon have raised prices on current and next-generation AI processors. Huawei's Ascend 950DT accelerator card is now priced above 250,000 yuan, approximately $37,255—a 20 to 50 percent increase from quotes given to customers roughly two months earlier, depending on contract terms.

SMIC tells the same story from the foundry side. Tom's Hardware reported in August that China's largest chipmaker posted its first $3 billion quarter, with revenue up 36.1 percent year-on-year and utilization at 93.7 percent. Co-CEO Zhao Haijun told analysts the company would charge more for wafers processed in the third quarter after negotiations with customers. That is not what an industry starved into irrelevance looks like. It is what pricing power looks like.

The catch is real. Reuters reported that US restrictions on high-bandwidth memory exports have pushed Chinese chipmakers toward grey-market channels, where HBM can cost several times what buyers elsewhere pay. Sanctions are raising costs, making the supply chain uglier, but they are not stopping demand from showing up.

Wall Street has spent years treating Chinese AI chip demand as Nvidia's to lose and Nvidia's alone to serve. If Huawei and Cambricon can push through sharp price increases while SMIC runs near capacity, the gap that US export controls were meant to protect is not a wall. It is a toll booth. Chinese buyers are paying the toll.

None of this means Washington is about to lift its export controls. Bloomberg Law reported in July that US lawmakers were pressing Trump's team to close what they described as a loophole in China tech restrictions, focused on whether Chinese companies could use intermediaries to get chips produced by TSMC or Samsung. The politics still run hard against relaxation.

But Daines' trip changes the tone of the argument. He is not a China dove looking for a softer line. He is a Trump ally who visited research and technology firms, took a flight in a certified autonomous aircraft, and came back warning that the US may be misjudging the scale of what it is up against.

That should worry the administration more than any single chip price. Export controls only work if the people enforcing them understand the gap they are trying to preserve. If that gap is narrower than Washington thought, the policy cannot run on old assumptions and tough language forever.

Xi is expected in Washington on September 24. Whatever Trump says publicly about chip controls, he will be doing it with one of his own allies on record saying China's technology sector deserves a harder look.