United States President Donald Trump has confirmed that his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will visit Washington on September 24, with artificial intelligence (AI) expected to dominate the talks.
Trump made the announcement on July 23 at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, where he was presenting an expansion of a voluntary pledge meant to stop the cost of powering AI data centres falling on American households.
“President Xi is coming over on September 24th,” he said, adding that the two leaders had already discussed the technology during his own trip to Beijing and would return to it.
The confirmation followed a meeting on July 22 between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the margins of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers’ gathering in Manila.
Rubio said the two sides needed to identify areas of cooperation in order to “lay the groundwork for a very positive visit”. He acknowledged that significant differences between Washington and Beijing would persist for the foreseeable future.
Wang’s ministry said the two had agreed to prepare for further high-level exchanges, and called on Washington to respect what it described as China’s core interests.
Trump travelled to Beijing on May 14-15, the first visit to China by a sitting US president in nine years. He had met Xi on Chinese soil once before, during his first term in the White House.
For Brussels, the September date carries an awkward echo. Xi declined to travel to Europe for the July 2025 EU-China summit, obliging European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa to fly to Beijing for a meeting cut from two days to one that produced no breakthrough.
Relations have not warmed since. The EU goods trade deficit with China reached about €360 billion in 2025 and has kept widening, running at roughly €1 billion a day, while Chinese export controls on rare earths have pushed the European Commission into defensive measures on steel imports and low-value parcels.
Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič has set an October deadline for tangible progress on the imbalance and is expected to travel to China that month. The Commission has also assembled a cross-departmental task force to prepare for a possible supply disruption, with its first meeting due in September.
Xi last set foot in the United States in November 2023, for a summit with then president Joe Biden in San Francisco. No comparable trip to Brussels is on the diplomatic calendar.
