GM. This is Milk Road AI, where we follow the chips, the money, and the geopolitical chess moves driving the AI economy.

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THE SUMMIT THAT CHANGED NOTHING AND EVERYTHING

In 1944, the Allies sat down at Bretton Woods to rebuild the global economic order from scratch.

They agreed on a reserve currency, a gold standard, the IMF, the World Bank, and basically the entire financial architecture that your mortgage still runs on.

It took three weeks and produced one of the most consequential agreements in modern history.

Last week, Trump flew to Beijing with 17 of the world's richest CEOs, sat across from Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People, and made an announcement.

A promise that China might buy some planes someday, maybe, pending paperwork and geopolitical mood swings.

Markets hit all-time highs on Tuesday but by Thursday, the same markets realized that nothing had actually been signed. 

Chinese chip stocks fell 4%, and Boeing dropped nearly 5% right after Trump announced the “massive win” on aircraft orders.

And yet this summit mattered enormously but just not for the reasons anyone was writing about.

Here's the real story.

The translator problem

To understand what actually happened in Beijing, you first have to understand the dynamic that both sides walked into.

The U.S. and China are two countries that hate each other, share a mortgage, and absolutely cannot afford to break up right now.

On the American side, wholesale inflation is running at 6% year-over-year, the Iran War has pushed oil above $100 a barrel, and the October trade truce expiration is a loaded gun sitting on the table.

And here’s the part most people miss about oil spikes: a barrel of oil doesn’t just become gasoline. 

Nearly 11% of every barrel gets turned into jet fuel, which means when crude explodes higher, airlines immediately get squeezed. 

Ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit Airlines survive on razor-thin margins, so when fuel costs suddenly surge, the entire business model starts breaking apart, which is one of the major reasons Spirit ultimately went bankrupt.

And if tariffs snap back to 145%, it won't be pretty, and Trump knows it.

On the Chinese side, heavy rare earth exports are down 50% because Beijing has been weaponizing them, while the economy still needs U.S. consumer demand like a plant needs sunlight.

And Xi just invoked the Thucydides Trap, a concept about rising powers and catastrophic wars, which is a genuinely alarming thing to bring up at what was supposed to be a commercial meeting.

Both sides needed this meeting, yet neither side wanted to blink first.

So they walked out with something that isn't quite a deal, isn't quite a failure, and is very specifically designed to be unprovable either way.

And nowhere was that tension more visible than in the single most important story of the entire summit, AI chips.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the most important chip company on earth, was not on the original White House guest list.

He was excluded by China hawks inside the administration who didn't want the guy whose chips China desperately wants sitting at the negotiating table.

The media reported the snub, but Trump personally called Huang, and he then flew to Alaska to physically board Air Force One during a refueling stop.

That single sequence of events tells you everything about the real agenda of this summit. 

AI chip diplomacy is now conducted at the presidential level by the President of the United States personally calling a CEO to get him on the plane.

The Nvidia situation is the axis around which everything else rotates. 

China was cleared to buy H200 chips, Nvidia's second most powerful AI processor, back in January. 

But Chinese customs has physically blocked every single shipment, and not one chip has crossed the border. 

The approved buyers, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD(.)com, are sitting there with up to 75,000 chips each pre-approved, at $25,000–$30,000 per chip, which is roughly $112B in potential orders from just 10 companies.

And the summit didn't resolve it. 

Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, explicitly confirmed after the bilateral meeting that chip export controls were not discussed.

The biggest commercial-geopolitical item in the entire U.S.–China relationship wasn't on the agenda.

Watch for this to move at Xi's expected September U.S. visit, before the October truce expires. 

That's the next real moment.

The summit decoded: Who actually won

Trump announced that China agreed to buy 200 Boeing jets, calling it a “fantastic” outcome while hinting the number could eventually rise to 750.

Boeing stock fell 4.7% the day of the announcement.

The market had priced in 500 jets minimum, so when you promise the best steak on the menu and deliver chicken tenders, people notice.

But here's the part that really matters: this might not even be 200 genuinely new jets. 

Aviation analysts noted that some of these "orders" could be existing backlog orders being repackaged with fresh summit branding. 

And even if every jet is brand new, Boeing's 737 MAX still hasn't received CAAC recertification in China, which means Chinese passengers can't legally board them yet.

You can order a car without a license, but you still can't drive it.

And the 2017 playbook is worth remembering, Trump’s first Beijing trip produced $250B in “deals,” including a 300-jet Boeing commitment that was announced with massive fanfare but largely never delivered.

The summit math tends to look better on a press release than on a balance sheet.

But while everyone was focused on Boeing, something much bigger quietly went untouched.

THE SUMMIT THAT CHANGED NOTHING AND EVERYTHING (P2)

The most important thing that happened at the summit was a non-announcement.

Heavy rare earth exports from China, elements like dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium that go into EV motors, military-grade magnets, and semiconductor manufacturing, are still down roughly 50% from peak levels.

And that matters because China not only controls roughly 90% of the world’s rare earth processing capacity, but also holds the world’s largest rare earth reserves at roughly 44M metric tons, more than double Brazil’s reserves and massively ahead of the U.S.

The October 2025 Busan truce gave the U.S. some breathing room, but that truce expires in October 2026.

No formal rare earth deal was announced in Beijing, and Chinese state media didn't mention rare earths a single time.

By not formalizing an extension, Beijing keeps the rare earth card fully playable ahead of the October tariff deadline, Xi's September U.S. visit, and, in what should terrify supply chain planners everywhere, the 2026 U.S. midterm elections.

The American Chamber of Commerce estimates a 10% disruption in rare earth-dependent industries would trigger $150B in global losses within a year. 

China doesn’t even need to threaten it directly but that possibility alone is enough.

The portfolio behind the politics

On May 14th, the same day Trump was in Beijing announcing Boeing jet orders and Nvidia chip approvals, his ethics disclosures landed publicly.

Over 3,700 trades in Q1 2026 alone, with an estimated aggregate value of $220M to $770M.

Including up to $5M in Boeing stock purchased on February 10th. 

Up to $5M in Nvidia stock on the same day, alongside up to $7.2M in Apple shares and smaller buys in Micron, Tesla, and Qualcomm.

These are the exact companies whose CEOs he personally invited to Beijing, whose commercial interests dominated the summit agenda, and whose stocks moved on the announcements he made while standing inside the Great Hall of the People.

One week after the February 10th Nvidia purchase, Nvidia disclosed a major chip deal with Meta. Trump also bought Nvidia shares before the Commerce Department formally approved Nvidia chip exports to China.

The White House says all trades are managed by third-party discretionary accounts with zero presidential input. 

Maybe that's true but the timing patterns, however, are the kind of thing that tends to generate bipartisan scrutiny and, eventually, subpoenas.

The honest verdict

The Beijing summit was not Bretton Woods, but rather was two people in a difficult marriage agreeing not to throw plates for another few months.

Both sides needed the meeting. 

Both sides got something: optics, goodwill, and the ability to tell their domestic audiences they "won." 

Neither side signed anything that meaningfully changes the structural rivalry driving this relationship.

The October tariff cliff is still coming, rare earths are still weaponized, H200 chips are still sitting at Chinese customs. 

Taiwan is still the tripwire Xi said it was publicly, at maximum volume, at the most important bilateral summit in a decade.

The market is pricing the upside but is not pricing the tail risks.

The next major catalytic event is Xi's expected September U.S. visit. 

Watch the invite, watch the agenda, and most importantly, watch what actually gets formally signed.

Until then, managed tension is the trade.

Alright, that's it for this edition of Milk Road AI. We want to hear from you.

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