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Wendy R. Anderson is a former senior official in the Obama administration, serving in the Defense and Commerce departments.
Chinese firms are methodically expanding their footprint across the world, selling not just chips but a full artificial intelligence stack: hardware, cloud, developer tools, standards and the financing to make the bundle irresistible. In country after country, the question is no longer whether AI infrastructure will be built, but who will provide the building blocks. The answer is not even being contested by the United States.
Traditionally, Washington has treated AI export policy as an exercise in keeping advanced chips out of Chinese hands, tightening export controls — and waiting. While the highest-end controls matter and should stay, that alone is proving insufficient. To put it in Cold War terms, the U.S. needs to move beyond containment and seek primacy.
In 2024, when U.S. chipmaker Nvidia competed inside China, Huawei sold roughly 200,000 of its competing Ascend chips. After the Biden administration pushed Nvidia to stop selling in China, Huawei planned to produce triple that amount in 2026. Huawei also plans to produce 1.6 million chip dies this year while exporting its Ascend ecosystem to U.S. allies like South Korea and Malaysia, and adversaries like Iran and Russia.
The Biden administration’s export ban handed Huawei a captive market. ByteDance, one of the world’s most sophisticated AI developers, is reportedly planning to order $5.6 billion worth of Huawei chips in 2026. A year ago, it was barely buying any Huawei chips at all. From here on out, export controls will have no effect on a firm like ByteDance.
Huawei has a distinctive edge in rapidly emerging markets. It shows up offering an entire attractive package: chips, cloud, implementation support, smart-city systems and state-backed financing bundled into a single deal. This is very similar to the strategy it employed when selling countries solutions for the 5G wireless rollout. And just like then, Washington warned allies about the risks of doing business with a Chinese state champion. But the U.S. never paired those warnings with an alternative that was easy to finance, deploy and adopt.
The Trump administration has moved closer to the right frame. The decision to allow carefully vetted sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to commercial customers in China, while holding back the most advanced hardware, challenged Huawei’s domestic market dominance and kept American tech embedded in the world’s largest AI ecosystem. But it needs to think bigger. The global race will be won in the data centers going up in Gulf capitals and in the cloud environments being locked in across Southeast Asia. National AI strategies are being drafted across Africa and Latin America. U.S. companies need to compete.
The White House’s AI Action Plan is a big step in the right direction. It calls for full-stack AI export packages to be actively promoted to allies through the Commerce Department, State Department and Export-Import Bank. But all this architecture still exists mostly on paper. What’s missing is urgency and scale. Three concrete steps would change that.
First, the Export-Import Bank — America’s official export credit agency, whose purpose is to finance deals that advance U.S. strategic interests abroad — already has a mandate to prioritize AI. It should bring 10 flagship AI infrastructure deals to close in 2026, across the Gulf, Southeast Asia and Africa, and publish a scorecard for accountability.
Second, the Commerce Department’s export licensing office needs to create a trusted-partner fast lane for AI exports. “Five Eyes” countries, NATO allies and other close strategic partners should not face the same licensing process as unknown buyers in contested markets. A tiered system for chips, cloud access and related software would speed exports to reliable partners and keep careful review in place where the security risks are greater.
Third, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation — the government’s international investment bank — should launch its first cohort of AI infrastructure investments this year. Congress has already expanded its lending capacity, tripling it to $205 billion, with AI named as a priority. The authority and capital are there. What is needed now is direction from the White House to use them.
None of this requires new legislation or new money. It requires execution. Export controls are a defensive instrument. They can slow an adversary. They cannot organize a market, build a coalition or lock in a preferred technology ecosystem. Only an affirmative strategy does that.
The Trump administration has shown it can act fast when it decides something matters. It has a real opportunity here. At the moment, the U.S. is writing strategies, while China keeps signing contracts. Only one of those things builds the future.
The post The U.S. needs to go on AI offense appeared first on Washington Post.
