By Emilio Crespo
The US wants to protect its technological supremacy, undermined by China, globalization and the relocations that its large companies promoted to increase profits. Two of the worst demons of North American business culture, protectionism and state interventionism, are the instruments with which, copying Beijing, Donald Trump tries to avoid the technological decline of the United States and inject competitiveness into his companies.
The North American Government surprised economic agents by purchasing, for almost 9 billion dollars, 10% of Intel, which was the world’s leading producer of processors until, thanks to its orders and those of other American firms, it was surpassed by the Taiwanese TSMC.
Ten months later, the plan to multiply chip production in Intel factories steals premium customers from the Chinese. Two weeks ago, Trump announced an agreement for Apple devices to have Made in the USA processors.
Added to the chip offensive is government supervision of advances in Artificial Intelligence. Anthropic’s advanced models, to which another from OpenAI (GPT-5.5 Cyber) has just been added, can only be used by US nationals. The Trump Administration ignored the complaints of its allies about this measure at the recent G-7 meeting in France.
Washington’s latest offensive has been in quantum computing. Surrounded by the presidents of Google, IBM and other major players in the sector, Trump signed two decrees last week to develop it at a rapid pace. In 5 years the US should have a quantum computer that performs scientific calculations and the necessary infrastructure and supplies so that it is not a simple laboratory achievement.