Washington barred the world from touching Huawei’s silicon, betting Huawei would choke and China’s AI surge would stall. Tencent answered with foresight, not fury: it quietly hoarded a million Nvidia H20 chips—enough compute to train several generations of models—then rewrote its code so each GPU does double duty. Across the Pacific, TSMC broke ground on three Arizona megafabs and vowed that advanced packaging, not just smaller transistors, will keep Moore’s Law alive; by 2028 its 1.4-nanometre wafers will roll out beside the desert saguaro. Huawei refused to beg for Android’s return; Harmony OS leapt onto a billion devices and, with a pure-blood PC version, threatens the long marriage of Windows and Mac. Japan and China, meanwhile, trimmed a hundred-plus billion dollars of Treasuries to fund stimulus and defend the yuan, hinting that capital may decouple next. Tariffs now raise U.S. prices less than half as much as they did in 2018, proof that supply chains learn to bend around walls. From fab domes in Arizona to Tencent’s glowing Shenzhen tower, every player is stockpiling, redesigning, or re-shoring for an era where code, chips, and money obey new borders. The question is no longer whether the tech-finance split is coming—it’s which side will master the art of thriving inside smaller worlds.
