U.S. President Donald Trump said he and Chinese President Xi Jinping made progress on a TikTok agreement and pledged to meet face-to-face in just over a month in South Korea.

The two sides appeared to lower tensions during the first call in three months between the leaders of the two superpowers, but it was not immediately clear if the call had yielded the expected firm agreement over the fate of the popular short-video app.

Trump said the leaders agreed to talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum that starts on October 31 in Gyeongju, South Korea, and for a potential later visit to China by Trump.

“We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal,” Trump wrote on social media. “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!” he added.

China’s official account of the discussion, however, was more restrained and made no reference to a final agreement.

“On TikTok, Xi said China’s position is that the Chinese government respects the will of firms and welcomes companies to conduct business negotiations on the basis of market rules to reach a solution consistent with Chinese laws and regulations while balancing interests,” according to the meeting summary in Xinhua.

A Long-Running Flashpoint

The fate of TikTok has been one of the most contentious issues in U.S.-China relations since 2020, when Washington first raised concerns that the platform’s Chinese ownership through ByteDance posed national security risks. U.S. lawmakers and intelligence agencies repeatedly warned that the app’s massive data troves could be accessed by Beijing, a charge the company has denied.

Efforts to ban or force the sale of TikTok to an American company have been tied up in U.S. courts for years, with ByteDance pursuing legal challenges while simultaneously striking data storage deals with American cloud providers in hopes of easing concerns. Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart were at different points floated as potential partners, though those negotiations repeatedly broke down.

The Trump administration revived pressure in recent months, framing the TikTok deal as not only a matter of national security but also as a bargaining chip in the broader trade negotiations with China. Trump has tied the approval of a deal to wider economic discussions, using TikTok as both a symbol of Chinese tech dominance and a lever in disputes over trade imbalances, tariffs, and intellectual property protections.

That backdrop explains why the TikTok issue emerged alongside other major points in the Trump-Xi call. According to Trump, discussions also covered fentanyl exports, a key concern for U.S. law enforcement, as well as the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. The blending of issues shows how technology platforms have become inseparable from broader questions of national security and trade policy.

While Trump expressed optimism, Beijing’s cautious wording highlights the deep differences yet to be reconciled. For China, allowing TikTok to be carved away from its parent company ByteDance would not only set a precedent for foreign pressure on its tech giants but also be seen domestically as a concession under U.S. duress.

Analysts note that any progress on TikTok could signal a temporary thaw in tensions, but without a binding agreement, the platform’s U.S. future remains uncertain. The matter, for now, has moved from the courtroom and regulatory hearings into the highest level of diplomacy — a sign of both TikTok’s global cultural clout and its symbolic weight in the rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

Huawei is moving assertively to position itself as China’s answer to Nvidia in the escalating global race for artificial intelligence hardware.

At its annual Huawei Connect conference on Thursday, the Shenzhen-based tech giant unveiled new AI infrastructure that it says will dramatically boost computing power for Chinese firms — a development that lands just as Beijing shuts the door on Nvidia’s products in the domestic market.

The centerpiece of Huawei’s announcement is its SuperPoD Interconnect technology, an advanced system capable of linking up to 15,000 graphics cards, including Huawei’s in-house Ascend AI processors, into a single cluster. The approach mirrors Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect, which has become essential to the U.S. chipmaker’s market dominance by enabling high-speed communication across massive GPU arrays.

Huawei acknowledged that its Ascend chips remain less powerful on a per-unit basis than Nvidia’s GPUs, but emphasized that clustering them together could provide the raw computing muscle needed to train and scale AI systems at levels required by Chinese cloud providers, research institutions, and corporations. “Technology like this is critical for Huawei to compete,” one executive stressed during the keynote.

The timing stirs interest. On Wednesday, Beijing banned domestic tech firms from purchasing Nvidia’s hardware, including the specially designed RTX Pro 600D servers Nvidia had created for the Chinese market. The move effectively cuts off access to the most advanced U.S. GPUs and underscores how deeply the AI arms race has become entangled in the broader U.S.-China technology rivalry.

The rollout of Huawei’s SuperPoD signals not only a commercial play but also a political one. Analysts say it reflects China’s push for self-sufficiency in advanced technology, particularly in semiconductors, as Washington continues to tighten restrictions on high-end chip exports. With U.S. sanctions preventing Huawei from acquiring cutting-edge lithography tools, the company has been forced to innovate around constraints — clustering more chips together to achieve computing gains that single processors cannot yet match.

The stakes are high. According to the FTC and other observers, compute power is now the bottleneck for AI development, with Western cloud giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon investing tens of billions into Nvidia GPU-powered data centers. In this context, Huawei’s SuperPoD is more than a technical advance; it is a strategic attempt to ensure China’s AI ecosystem can scale despite being locked out of U.S. hardware.

Huawei’s effort also raises questions about how far Washington might go in response. If Huawei succeeds in providing a credible domestic alternative to Nvidia, U.S. policymakers may seek to expand sanctions further to block the flow of enabling technologies — from advanced networking chips to software tools — that could support large-scale Chinese AI training.

For now, Huawei is betting that its clustering approach will give China’s AI industry a lifeline. The SuperPoD is expected to gain rapid adoption across China’s cloud and research sectors, helping the country build its own AI foundation models at scale. This is expected to be driven by strong domestic demand, which will allow Huawei to close the performance gap with Nvidia through volume, clustering, and continued refinements. Under this outlook, Beijing’s backing ensures funding, infrastructure, and market protection, positioning Huawei as a viable global alternative within the next decade.

However, there is concern that while Huawei achieves moderate success within China, carving out a protected domestic market, it will struggle to expand globally due to both technical hurdles and U.S. sanctions. This means, while SuperPoD becomes a symbol of China’s determination for self-sufficiency, Nvidia and other Western chipmakers continue to dominate the high end of the global AI market.