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President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Wednesday over Chinese-made equipment in the core of America’s AI data centers. The numbers behind his declaration are stunning.
In a move that threatens to rip apart the global supply chain for data center hardware, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency in order to block the importation of Chinese equipment buried deep inside America’s AI infrastructure. The new executive order signed by Trump last week gives the Department of Energy the authority to block or to impose conditions on transactions involving foreign-made equipment in the bulk-power system as well as in data center construction.
China’s share of other subcategories of transformers and switchgear, used to power the facility, ranges around 30 percent, according to Yury Dvorkin, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. For batteries specifically imported for data centers, the Chinese share is over 40 percent. And then there are the raw materials that Chinese suppliers control at the upstream stages of production — copper, electrical steel, and battery cathode materials, to name a few.
But it’s not just the substation transformers that the AI infrastructure buildout is increasingly dependent on Chinese imports for, according to Ben Boucher, senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie. He highlights a few key areas of supply chain exposure that the AI buildout of data centers is dependent on. “And if you can’t bring those in, you can’t build out the AI infrastructure of the data centers,” he said.
China has a near two-thirds share of global optical transceiver units in revenue terms, led by the market of two major domestic firms, Zhongji Innolight and Eoptolink, which together account for over 50 percent of data center optical transceiver markets — other Chinese companies taking up the remainder.
These components had already been classified by the administration in the April Presidential Determination as “essential to the national defense,” but the new EO is the mechanism by which that classification will be enforced.
While the administration is finally enforcing a national policy to defend America’s most strategic assets from an adversary that openly seeks to surpass the U.S. and dominate the planet, some of America’s biggest and wealthiest corporations are moving with surprising speed. In September 2025, Hitachi Energy committed billions to building critical American grid infrastructure, including million for a new large power transformer manufacturing facility. In February 2026, Siemens Energy joined the rush with a billion pledge to manufacture critical American grid equipment and gas turbine power plants domestically.
The Trump EO frames Chinese-supplied grid equipment as an “extraordinary foreign threat” to the national interest — language typically reserved for economic and national security emergencies where the president can act unilaterally because of the severity of the threat.
For years, America’s most critical infrastructure has been wired with components from an adversary bent on surpassing the U.S. as the world’s leading power. That is going to end. Whether American corporations will move with sufficient speed to matter is another question entirely.
