Washington’s new cold war is fought with silicon and code. Since 2022 the U.S. has tightened chip controls four times, then leapt upstream to police cloud clusters and even the AI weights that run on them. The aim isn’t to stop China, only to slow it—each rule cuts another slice of speed and margin from Shenzhen to Shanghai.

Beijing answers by trading elegance for autonomy. SMIC’s 5-nanometre line runs on older tools at double the cost and half the yield of TSMC, yet every flawed wafer teaches self-reliance. Huawei’s Ascend accelerators and RISC-V start-ups patch gaps, while 325 million digital-yuan wallets and BRICS pilots quietly rehearse payments beyond SWIFT and the petrodollar.

Europe, pinned between allied bans and Chinese EVs, slaps tariffs on tomorrow’s cars to rescue yesterday’s fabs. Gulf exporters open renminbi swap lines, hedge funds price tariffs into batteries, and African states weigh telecom bids that bundle cloud, currency and cobalt.

The giants aren’t decoupling so much as relaying track beneath a moving train. Each chokepoint breeds a workaround; each workaround scripts the next chokepoint. The real race is no longer to 3 nm but to shape the operating system of a fractured marketplace.