Huawei, China’s answer to Nvidia, is rapidly expanding its AI technology into other countries and signaling a rapid acceleration in the global AI race. It’s a move AI experts predicted would not occur.
Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, South Africa, and Turkey will now be able to build on Huawei’s Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform, which includes AI models like DeepSeek.
Much like individual consumers who become dependent on Apple’s ecosystem, companies that build on Huawei’s models and cloud infrastructure risk becoming deeply tied to that platform. At scale, this creates a ripple effect — as companies that adopt Chinese technology may find it difficult to switch to American providers later.
The switching costs are anything but trivial. Migrating away from Huawei would require rewriting code, transferring massive datasets, and re-optimizing systems — making it difficult for countries to later pivot to U.S. providers.
But it’s not just software expansion. Rolling out its cloud compute means rolling out the underlying infrastructure — hardware and chips. Former White House AI Czar David Sacks says that’s what he wants for the United States. “You just want everybody to be building on top of your technology stack.” He says that winning the AI race looks like 80% of the world using America’s tech stack — and losing looks like 80% of the world using China’s.
Before Huawei’s expansion announcement, AI experts downplayed Huawei’s technology. In January of 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and former Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger told the Wall Street Journal that Huawei was “in no position to export chips at a meaningful scale.”
Lennart Heim, former Lead on AI & Compute at RAND’s Technology and Security Policy Center, said, “I still don’t see Chinese AI chips being used much globally — or even in China. Not saying it won’t become an issue, but current evidence shows limited to no adoption both domestically and internationally.” Another advisor for RAND, a nonprofit think tank, Jimmy Goodrich, said China didn’t even have enough chips to meet its own demand.
Previously, Sacks and President Trump condemned Washington’s bureaucracy around the American tech stack, which he said resulted in businesses applying for licenses every time they sent a regulated chip.
“The last administration was obsessed with imposing restrictions on AI, including extreme restrictions on its exports,” said President Trump. “As you know, they made it very difficult to export. This alienated American partners and drove even our friends into the arms of China and other countries.”
In July of 2025, President Trump signed an executive order promoting the export of the American AI tech stack, including hardware, models, software, and applications, to “America’s friends.”
Some people do not want China or the United States to advance in AI adoption. On Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) hosted a rally protesting AI’s acceleration. In March, he proposed legislation along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that called for a moratorium on AI data centers.
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