OPEN LETTER: Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella — Beijing has already made the choice for you

OPEN LETTER: Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella — Beijing has already made the choice for you

Introduction: Gentlemen, the hour of choice has arrived

A letter no one wanted to write

I am writing to you from outside your headquarters — from the vantage point of someone who has observed, for years, the way you navigate between Washington and Beijing with the grace of tightrope walkers above an abyss. Tim Cook, you run Apple, the world's most valued brand. Elon Musk, you built Tesla, SpaceX, X — and you are now as much a political actor as an industrial one. Satya Nadella, you transformed Microsoft into a powerhouse of the artificial intelligence era. Your three names represent a substantial fraction of global stock market value, and a technological influence no government can ignore.

But in June 2026, the moment when you could still pretend to navigate freely between the two superpowers is over. China has just published two decrees — 834 and 835 — that explicitly place you before a choice: either you comply with Chinese regulatory requirements, or you risk having your assets frozen, your transactions blocked, your operations paralyzed. At the same time, Washington is tightening its export controls and expecting from you a structural loyalty. The middle ground no longer exists. It is not I who say so — it is geopolitics.

Why this letter, now

I am writing to you now because China has just announced a plan worth 295 billion dollars to build a national artificial intelligence network running on 80% domestic chips — essentially Huawei, Biren and Moore Threads chips — de facto excluding Nvidia and AMD from China's AI infrastructure market. This plan, piloted by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), operated by China Mobile and China Telecom, is not a private sector initiative. It is a declaration of technological independence. And it directly concerns you, whether you want it to or not.

Meanwhile, Apple is already using Alibaba Cloud in China to deploy Apple Intelligence. Google is examining the adoption of Chinese CXMT memory chips for its infrastructure. The boundaries between commercial accommodation and strategic dependence are eroding faster than you are communicating to your shareholders. It is time to speak candidly.

Tim Cook and Apple: the calculus of dependence

China as factory, as market, as trap

Tim Cook, you built the most efficient supply chain in industrial history — and you built it in China. Foxconn in Zhengzhou, Pegatron in Shanghai, dozens of component suppliers spread across Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. This architecture was rational. It was brilliant. It allowed Apple to produce iPhones at costs no other geography could match in 2010.

But in 2026, this architecture has become a strategic vulnerability that Beijing no longer hesitates to use as leverage. Decree 834, which came into force in April 2026, allows Chinese authorities to open investigations into companies that "restrict or cut normal commercial relations" with Chinese counterparts — notably to comply with foreign sanctions or export controls. In other words: if Apple shifts more production to India or Vietnam in response to Washington's requirements for secure supply chains, Beijing can pursue you.

Apple Intelligence on Alibaba Cloud: a concession that says everything

The decision to host Apple Intelligence on Alibaba Cloud in China was not an ideological choice. It was a commercial choice constrained by Chinese data sovereignty regulations. You could not deploy your own cloud infrastructure in China without a local partner. You chose Alibaba. And in doing so, you integrated the core of your most advanced AI product into the infrastructure of an operator subject to Chinese national security laws — laws that allow authorities to access data on simple request.

I am not saying you acted wrongly in regard to your legal obligations in China. I am saying this decision perfectly illustrates the paradox you are trapped in. You build tools that protect privacy everywhere in the world — and in China, you host them in a system that offers none of those guarantees. This is not sustainable in the long run, neither for your brand, nor for your users, nor for the credibility of the Western model of data protection.

Elon Musk and Tesla: the debts accumulated in Beijing

Shanghai as Tesla's backbone

Elon Musk, your Shanghai factory — Tesla's most productive Gigafactory — represents a substantial share of your global production capacity. In 2025, it manufactured more than one million vehicles per year, exported to Europe and Asia-Pacific in addition to the Chinese market. Without Shanghai, Tesla is not the same company. This is an industrial reality you have yourself publicly acknowledged.

This dependence has led you to public positions that surprised many observers. You criticized the Taiwanese government. You proposed a "special administrative zone" status for Taiwan — a formulation that closely resembles Beijing's own vocabulary on the question. You have been more measured in your criticism of the Chinese regime than of any other world power. These positions have a context: Shanghai is a commercial hostage you yourself handed over as collateral.

The Musk paradox: freedom of speech in the West, silence on China

You bought X — formerly Twitter — in the name of freedom of expression. You reinstated banned accounts, denounced censorship by Western governments, positioned X as the "digital public square" of the free world. This is your right. It is even a genuine contribution to the debate on content moderation in democracy. But X is blocked in China. And you never talk about it. The censorship that outrages you in San Francisco is structurally more severe in Shanghai — and there, it is silence.

This silence is not incomprehensible. It is human. It is industrial. It is costly to bite the hand that runs your factory. But it says something about the consistency of your convictions — and about what Beijing has long understood: that your industrial interests are a more effective lever than any diplomatic pressure for moderating your behavior.

Satya Nadella and Microsoft: AI between two superpowers

The partnership and the AI frontier

Satya Nadella, you have invested massively in OpenAI and transformed Microsoft into a central actor in the artificial intelligence revolution. Azure hosts a growing fraction of the world's AI infrastructure. Your integration of Copilot into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem reaches hundreds of millions of professional users. And you built this position in the West with remarkable strategic clarity.

But in China, the situation is different. Microsoft operates under the same regulatory constraints as others — cybersecurity laws, data sovereignty laws, localization requirements. Your partnerships with local actors to deploy your services in the Chinese market involve the same compromises as Apple with Alibaba. The NDRC and its 295-billion-dollar plan for an AI infrastructure running 80% on domestic components structurally excludes you from the world's largest developing AI market — unless you find local arrangements that raise exactly the same questions of data security and sovereignty.

Decoupling as industrial reality

The 295-billion-dollar Chinese plan is not just an investment in AI infrastructure. It is the institutionalization of a technological decoupling that analysts had been observing since 2018 but that governments hesitated to name clearly. By mandating that 80% of chips in the national AI network come from domestic suppliers, Beijing officially declares that your presence in critical Chinese infrastructure is no longer desired — not for Nvidia, not for Dell or HP servers, not for cloud architectures built on your technologies.

This decoupling is irreversible in the short and medium term. It does not depend on the outcome of the next American elections or the next rounds of trade negotiations. It is anchored in Chinese industrial policy in the same way as "Made in China 2025." The question for Microsoft — and for all of you — is no longer "how do we stay in the Chinese market as it was" but "how do we build a global strategy without this market as a base assumption."

Decrees 834 and 835: Beijing redefines the rules of the game

Two decrees that change everything

In March and April 2026, China published two decrees that formalize what Beijing had been practicing informally for years. Decree 834 — Regulations on Industrial Supply Chain Security — introduces risk monitoring systems, investigative powers, and coercive mechanisms against any company that "restricts or cuts normal commercial relations" with Chinese counterparts, notably to comply with foreign sanctions or export controls.

Decree 835 — Regulations on Countering Foreign Extraterritorial Jurisdiction — allows China to take retaliatory measures against entities that comply with foreign laws perceived as harming Chinese interests. In practice: if you reduce your purchases of Chinese components to respond to Washington's requirements for secure supply chains, Beijing can freeze your assets, ban you from transactions, impose import and export restrictions on you. This is the legalization of commercial blackmail at the state level.

You are caught between two legislative fires

Washington, for its part, continuously tightens its export controls on dual-use technologies, advanced chips, and data architectures. American laws require compliance with sanctions, prohibited entity lists, and OFAC restrictions. Every new Chinese component you integrate into your supply chain is potentially a vector of American regulatory risk. Every step you take to diversify outside of China is potentially a vector of Chinese regulatory risk.

This is not a moral dilemma. It is a structural dilemma imposed by two powers that have decided their competition runs through your supply chains. You did not create this problem. But you cannot afford to pretend it does not exist or that it will resolve itself through the magic of the market.

The 295-billion-dollar AI plan: the great exclusion of Western Big Tech

A 295-billion-dollar market from which you will be absent

On June 9, 2026, Bloomberg reported that China is preparing an investment of 2 trillion yuan — approximately 295 billion dollars — over five years to build a national network of AI data centers. The infrastructure will be operated by China Mobile and China Telecom, funded by sovereign debt, and given an explicit mandate: at least 80% of AI chips must come from domestic suppliers. When network power grid upgrades are included, the total exceeds 740 billion dollars.

To put this in perspective: American hyperscalers — Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet — will spend approximately 725 billion dollars just this year on AI infrastructure. The Chinese plan is therefore comparably ambitious, but state-directed and explicitly designed to exclude foreign suppliers. This is not a market signal — it is a signal of technological war. And in this war, you are not neutral actors: you are the designated adversary of the market Beijing is building.

Huawei as the central beneficiary — and as a warning

Huawei — the company Washington sought to suffocate since 2018 through increasingly severe sanctions — is today the primary beneficiary of the 295-billion-dollar plan. Its Ascend 910B series is approved for the national network. Its cloud architecture is integrated into the NDRC plan. What we tried to kill was revitalized by the very exclusion designed to destroy it. This is a lesson you should meditate on: in technological wars, the apparent loser can become the structural winner if the enemy makes strategic errors.

What Huawei represents in 2026 is proof that exclusion from Western markets can force a technological upgrade that ultimately creates a more dangerous rival than the actor one hoped to marginalize. Your respective governments should meditate on this reality before launching the next cycle of sanctions. And you, as CEOs of global companies, should integrate it into your five- and ten-year strategic scenarios.

What you owe democracy — and what democracy owes you

The geopolitical responsibility of Big Tech

You are not civil servants. You were not elected. No one asked your opinion on American or European foreign policy. But you hold a power that exceeds that of many states — in terms of data, critical infrastructure, capacity to shape global information and the economy. With this power comes a geopolitical responsibility you cannot entirely outsource to your Washington lobbyists or your Brussels lawyers.

This responsibility has a concrete form. It means not hosting Western users' data in infrastructure subject to Chinese national security law without transparent communication about the risks. It means not using your political weight to weaken regulations that protect citizens from authoritarian surveillance practices. It means — and I know this is the most difficult — accepting short-term financial losses to preserve long-term systemic integrity.

And what democratic governments owe you in return

The relationship is not unilateral. If democratic governments ask you to take regulatory and commercial risks in the name of shared values — freedom, privacy, national security — they have an obligation to offer you a coherent, predictable and fair framework. Not improvised sanctions. Not export controls that change scope from one administration to the next. Not contradictory injunctions between Washington, Brussels and London. A stable strategic framework in which you can plan ten years ahead.

This framework does not yet exist. That is also why you continue to navigate between Beijing and Washington with a survival strategy rather than a values strategy. Both sides bear some responsibility for this disorder. And both sides will have to make concessions to get out of it — you in transparency and strategic alignment, them in regulatory clarity and concrete support for your industrial transitions.

What I am specifically asking of you

Three requests, three responsibilities

To Tim Cook: publish a transparent annual report on the compromises you make in China regarding privacy, surveillance and legal compliance. Not buried in footnotes of terms of service — in an accessible, comprehensible, auditable document. Your users deserve to know what "privacy as a fundamental human right" means concretely in each country where you operate. If the answer in China is different from the rest of the world, say so. Own it. Or change it.

To Elon Musk: if X is the public square of the free world, say publicly why it is not available in China and what you are prepared to demand from Beijing to change that. You do not have to sacrifice Shanghai for this. But you cannot claim to defend universal freedom of expression while carefully sidestepping the most systematic censorship on the planet. To Satya Nadella: use Microsoft's weight to push for the establishment of an international regulatory framework on data and AI that is both competitive and defensive against the authoritarian model. You have the credibility, the resources and the network for it.

The moment when history demands more than management

There are moments in industrial history when the leaders of the largest companies face choices that go beyond maximizing shareholder value. We are in one of those moments. The technological competition between the United States and China is not a trade war among others: it is a conflict to determine which model — democratic or authoritarian — will dominate the world's digital infrastructure over the next thirty years. Your companies are at the heart of this conflict, whether they wanted to be or not.

I am not asking you to sacrifice your companies on the altar of ideology. I am asking you to recognize that you are geopolitical actors — and to act with the clarity and responsibility this status demands. History will judge not only what you built, but what you chose to defend when the choices were difficult. That moment is now.

Conclusion: Beijing is not waiting for your answer — it has already written it

The decision Beijing made for you

Allow me to end with a reality you know better than I do: Beijing has already decided on your behalf on the essentials. The 295-billion-dollar plan with its 80% domestic chip mandate excludes you from China's national AI infrastructure. Decrees 834 and 835 lock you into a coercive logic. Data sovereignty regulations force you into compromises you cannot entirely control. The China you hoped for as an infinite and stable market no longer exists. It has transformed into an actor that uses your dependence as an instrument of geopolitical pressure.

This is not a reason to panic. It is a reason for clarity. Major American technology companies still hold considerable leverage. They have the world's most advanced technology in foundational model architectures. They have the ecosystem of talent, capital and innovation that China is trying to replicate but has not yet equaled. These levers have value — provided they are used with a clear strategy, coordinated with allied governments, and founded on values that can be publicly defended.

The real question is not "how much will it cost" — it is "what is it for"

The real question is not how much it will cost you to reposition yourselves relative to China. The real question is: what is a technology company of this scale for in a world where democracies and autocracies are competing to define the rules of digital space? If the answer is "to maximize the return on investment for our shareholders" — that is an honest answer, but it is insufficient in the face of the magnitude of this moment. If the answer is "to build a freer, more connected and more prosperous world" — then your decisions about China in 2026 and 2027 will need to reflect that ambition. The world is watching. History is recording. And Beijing, for its part, is counting.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my biases

I fundamentally believe that liberal democracies produce better living conditions than authoritarian regimes — in terms of freedom, creativity, innovation and human dignity. This conviction shapes my reading of Sino-American tensions. I am neither anti-commerce nor anti-globalization. I believe companies must be able to operate in complex markets. But I consider transparency about the compromises made to be a moral obligation and a condition of trust. The information used in this letter comes from verifiable journalistic sources published in June 2026 — no private conversation is invented, no declaration is fabricated.

What I do not know

I do not have access to the internal China strategies of Apple, Microsoft or Tesla. The figures on the NDRC's 295-billion-dollar plan come from journalistic sources, not officially published government documents — the plan is still under discussion. I do not know to what extent Apple Intelligence on Alibaba Cloud actually exposes user data to Chinese authorities — this technical assessment is beyond my access. And I acknowledge that each company's situation is different and that important nuances may exist between public stances and actual practices.

Sources

Primary sources

Bloomberg — China Prepares $295 Billion Plan to Fund Nationwide AI Buildout (NDRC plan, 80% domestic chips, Huawei) — June 9, 2026

Sidley Austin — China's New Supply Chain Security Regulations: Key Takeaways (Decrees 834 and 835) — June 16, 2026

ABHS — China Plans $295B AI Grid, Locking Out Nvidia (technical details, Huawei Ascend, Biren, Moore Threads) — June 23, 2026

Ashare Insights — The $295 Billion Bet: How China's National AI Compute Plan Reshapes Global Capex (structural decoupling) — June 10, 2026

Secondary sources

Bloomberg Newsletter — China's AI Infrastructure Plan: $295 Billion Project to Challenge US (US/China competitive context) — June 12, 2026

Seoul Economic Daily — Apple, Google Eye Chinese Memory (YMTC, CXMT, Tim Cook) — June 20, 2026

Conventus Law — China: New Rules on Supply Chain Security and Countering Extraterritorial Jurisdiction (Decrees 834 and 835 in detail) — May 28, 2026