BYD and Xiaomi Bosses May Join Xi's US Trip — Deals Incoming

Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected in the US next week for a summit with President Donald Trump. According to two people familiar with the plans, he won't travel alone: a group of senior business figures from some of China's biggest companies is likely to come too. Big trips like this are usually about more than handshakes — they're where deals get talked about.

The names are the interesting part. BYD is the world's biggest maker of electric cars and a direct rival to Tesla. Xiaomi makes phones, home gadgets and now cars of its own. Innolight builds optical transceivers — think of them as the high-speed fiber-optic plumbing that lets AI data centres (the giant warehouses full of computers that train and run AI like ChatGPT) move enormous amounts of data between chips. Bank of China, the country's most international lender, may also be invited. It closely mirrors Trump's trip to Beijing in May, when he brought a crowd of American CEOs with him.

Here's the catch, and it's a big one. Innolight has reportedly been lined up for US export restrictions — meaning Washington wants to limit what the company can sell or buy. So its presence on the guest list would be a signal that both sides want to cool things down. That matters because AI doesn't run on chips alone; it needs fast connections between them, and those connections are a genuine bottleneck.

For you, this is mostly about prices and jobs. When two giant economies agree on investment and trade, it can show up later in what you pay for an electric car, a phone or a laptop. But nothing is confirmed. These are unnamed sources, guest lists change, and summits often end with warm words and no signed deals. Watch for announcements about tariffs — the import taxes that quietly raise the price of things you buy.