SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: The reality is that Tesla, Apple, Boeing, GE Aerospace, and all the others desperately need China, while Beijing structurally needs them less and less.

https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2054630163187704105

Mehdi (e/λ)

Translated from French

For those who have followed my threads on rare earths over the past few years, seeing Trump land in China surrounded by several CEOs from America's top companies is absolutely no surprise at all—it's exactly the scenario I had been announcing, because for me, this is the moment when the world's leading power publicly formalizes its industrial dependence on China and sends its champions to negotiate access to critical materials.

That said, I believe the strategic detail that's invisible to the general public is that this image seems to represent two powers that need each other, but in reality, it's totally asymmetrical—for a reminder, China controls 70% of global extraction, 85% of refining, 90% of permanent magnets, and 99% of dysprosium and terbium, without which no F-35 fighter jet takes off, no MRI machine works, and no iPhone starts up.

The reality is that Tesla, Apple, Boeing, GE Aerospace, and all the others desperately need China, while Beijing structurally needs them less and less.

The real geostrategic issue is that China has, in parallel, done invisible and patient work on sovereignty over semiconductors—I've already talked about this many times, but for example, SMIC produces 7nm chips using DUV multipatterning, Huawei's Ascend competes with Nvidia on AI inference, QiMeng designs RISC-V chips via AI, and SMEE has announced its first domestic EUV machine for 2027… there are still other gems under the radar that I could talk about (China communicates very little, if at all, on this topic).

In short, you'll have understood that China has built its independence while Washington, in my view, formalizes its dependence with this impressive trip, and no one in the mainstream media yet knows how to read what this photo really means.

In that sense, I believe the inspiring message for those who want to build in this new world is to understand that the next decade will entirely redefine the notion of industrial sovereignty.

To wrap up, know that those who master rare earths, sovereign semiconductors, foundries, packaging, embedded code, and energy materials will be the new silent emperors of the 21st century.