President Donald Trump’s China summit arrives amid heated AI competition with Beijing and a related debate over America’s semiconductor supply chain, often framed as a choice between two unsatisfying alternatives.
On one side is dependence on China: allowing critical technologies and components to flow through Chinese manufacturing networks because they are cheap, available, or convenient. On the other side is an economic nationalism that assumes the only truly secure chip is manufactured entirely in America, by an American company, using an American supply chain.
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That’s a false choice. For our national security and for real leverage at the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, we should stop treating it as anything but a trap.
In the U.S. military, we learned long ago that supply chain resilience is not the same thing as self-sufficiency. Our armed forces do not depend on a single supplier, a single factory, or even a single country. We build redundancy into critical systems because concentrating risk in one place is dangerous.
We should apply the same principle to the race to build memory capacity in our semiconductor ecosystem.
Today’s AI memory crisis underscores the stakes. Demand is projected to raise the cost of Dynamic Random Access Memory by more than 400% from 2024 through the end of 2026. We’ve already had a wake-up call. Apple is attempting to address its shortage by testing memory chips from a decade-old Chinese memory maker, which is now the world’s fourth-largest DRAM producer, with 10% of global capacity and growing.
China doesn’t have to lead in semiconductor design to change the strategic equation; it just has to build enough chip capacity that Apple and other companies start asking whether they can afford not to buy from China.
Our security demands that we make it easier to buy from America and our allies right away. The United States absolutely needs greater domestic semiconductor capacity, but we also need a safe, affordable, secure supply chain today while we build at home. That’s another reason it is imperative for our country to both scale and produce at home and work in concert with allies to achieve secure access to the chips that underpin our military, communications, artificial intelligence, and economy.
Building that capacity does not mean building everything ourselves, always or immediately.
America has something China lacks: a network of exceptionally capable allies with whom we share not only economic interests but also decades of military collaboration and deep strategic trust. Japan and South Korea are indispensable U.S. treaty allies. They are also semiconductor superpowers investing heavily in U.S. manufacturing and are critical to our memory chip supply, both now and in the future.
That is not a “dependence” we should fear. It is an advantage we should embrace.
The goal should be a resilient semiconductor ecosystem spanning the United States and our closest allies, with enough capacity and redundancy that no adversary — or single point of failure — can hold the American economy or military hostage.
This approach provides a more practical path to rebuilding American manufacturing. The world’s top memory chip companies are already turning to the U.S. for their next projects, but building domestic capacity takes time. Chip factories — known as “fabs” — require enormous capital, specialized workforces, and complex supplier networks. We should build that capacity steadily and strategically. While we do so, we should count on trusted partners whose interests and security commitments are aligned with ours.
This is critical as the White House prepares to meet Xi. Managing semiconductor trade is at the heart of the discussion. Export controls have an important role to play when technologies could materially strengthen Beijing’s military or intelligence capabilities. Controls should be strategic, targeted, and coordinated with allies — not an excuse to pretend that the U.S. can manufacture every component of every chip domestically.
There is already bipartisan recognition that allied coordination is essential to restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. We should apply that same logic to the positive side of the equation: an integrated American and allied semiconductor foundation to counter Beijing.
Consider this an “all of the above” answer. We should build more at home. We should encourage investment and buy more from our allies. We should reduce dangerous dependence on China. And we should recognize that strengthening the industrial base of America’s closest allies strengthens our own.
The objective is not total self-sufficiency. It is resilience.
America does not have to choose between China and going it alone. We can choose America — and build a semiconductor network with our trusted allies.
Lieutenant General Norman R. Seip, USAF (Ret.) is president of the American Security Project.
