Investors are increasingly viewing the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping as a test of whether the world’s two largest economies can keep trade, technology and supply-chain disputes from disrupting the AI boom.
“From a China-centric perspective, I think about it not so much in terms of the narrow confines or the outcomes of what happens in this discussion, but looking at that economy more broadly,” Chris Getter, portfolio manager at Simplify Asset Management, told AInvest’s “Capital & Power.”
The meeting is expected to focus on trade, rare earth minerals, advanced chips, Taiwan and potential Chinese purchases of U.S. goods, including aircraft and agricultural products. Reuters reported that top U.S. executives, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, are joining Trump’s China trip, underscoring the corporate stakes around the talks.
For investors, Getter said the summit matters not only for China-focused portfolios, but also for U.S. investors who already own companies with exposure to Chinese demand, manufacturing or supply chains.
“For U.S.-based investors who are already long China in some way because of these stocks that you own here in the U.S., that matters,” Getter said. “It matters from an inflation perspective because we are potentially going to pay more or less depending on what the tariff outcome is.”
China’s export machine has remained resilient despite the tariff fight. Reuters reported that China ended 2025 with a record trade surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion, helped by stronger sales to non-U.S. markets even as exports to the U.S. fell.
Getter said that export strength shows why investors should look beyond the summit headlines and focus on China’s longer-term economic transition. He said China’s reliance on exports and investment cannot continue indefinitely, and that domestic consumption is the next area investors should watch.
“The concern was, will that actually do damage to the economy? Apparently not,” Getter said of tariffs, pointing to China’s trade surplus.
Getter said consumption remains below 40% of China’s economy, compared with roughly 50% to 60% in developed economies. World Bank data also show China’s final consumption expenditure remains low relative to many developed markets, reinforcing the importance of Beijing’s effort to shift growth toward household demand.
“If I’m investing with a longer-term investment horizon in mind, those are the things that I would naturally want to go towards, things that benefit from China being a growing economy, but one that is increasingly reliant on the domestic consumption story,” Getter said.
The summit also carries direct implications for AI investors. Investors want Trump and Xi to avoid disrupting the artificial-intelligence trade, with chip export restrictions and China’s AI infrastructure push among the market’s central concerns. Taiwan remains at the center of that calculation. Getter said U.S. efforts to expand domestic chipmaking capacity do not erase Taiwan’s importance to advanced semiconductor production.
“There’s still a huge installed base of production capacity within Taiwan,” Getter said. “You need chips, you need all the tooling.”
Reuters reported last month that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is expanding 3-nanometer wafer capacity across Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan, with its U.S. plans tied to a $165 billion investment in Arizona chip factories.
Getter said China and Taiwan together account for almost 40% of emerging-market exposure, making the summit relevant even for investors who think they are simply buying broad emerging-market funds.
On tariffs, Getter said markets may respond as much to the existence of a deal as to its details.
“One thing that seems clear to me is that deals are just as important as the actual result,” Getter said. “Whatever is inside there perhaps matters less than being able to say, ‘We got it done.’”
Despite years of pressure to decouple, Getter said the U.S. and China remain linked by trade, technology, politics and supply chains. “We need each other economically, politically, and probably socially,” he said.