It's not a trade war — it's a technology war. China and the West are locked in a confrontation that determines who will control the planet's chips, AI, and telecommunications. March 2026 update.
📖 Read more: Bluetooth 7.0: What the New Generation Brings
🔧 Chips: The Main Battle
The US continues escalating sanctions on China's semiconductor industry. Huawei, cut off from TSMC and ASML, manufactures 7nm chips through SMIC — impressive, but two generations behind. NVIDIA sells “nerfed” GPUs to China (A800, H800), but even those face new restrictions. China's response: massive investment in its own supply chain — €50+ billion in domestic fabrication over the past three years.
🤖 AI: The Second Front
China isn't falling behind in AI — DeepSeek, Baidu ERNIE, Alibaba Qwen compete with GPT-4 and Claude. But training data quality and access to top hardware remain bottlenecks. The Biden (and now Trump) administration restricts AI chip and cloud computing service exports to Chinese companies.
📱 Telecom: Huawei vs Ericsson/Nokia
Huawei continues dominating 5G in Asia, Africa, and parts of Latin America. Europe is gradually removing Huawei equipment — but the process is slow and expensive. Ericsson and Nokia are winning deals but struggle to compete on price.
🇪🇺 Europe: Caught Between Fires
The EU is in a tough spot. It wants technological autonomy but depends on American cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Chinese hardware. The EU Chips Act aims to bring top-tier fabrication to Europe, but the first fabs won't be operational before 2028-2029. Until then, Europe remains a spectator.
