President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week came at a delicate moment for the two countries, as tension mounts over the Iran war, trade, and artificial intelligence. Other than a few commercial agreements, the meetings were short on concrete deliverables — at least ones that have been announced so far — but, as Council of Foreign Relations president Michael Froman wrote, “long on protocol, pomp, and circumstance.” If the goal was to smooth relations and make the two powers appear as peers on the world stage, it seems to have been a success.
But on at least on the clean energy front, China has been leaving the U.S. far behind, and Trump’s policies seem to have widened the gap further. A new report out this week from Atlas Public Policy puts numbers to the growing gulf between the two countries on clean technology manufacturing — and especially to the dramatic growth of China’s foreign direct investments and export capacity.
Between 2019 and 2025, Chinese companies made 55% of the world’s total of $1.1 trillion in clean energy manufacturing investments, according to Atlas. Another way to frame the divide: “There are 86 Chinese companies that have announced more than $1 billion in manufacturing investments, compared with 19 U.S. companies,” the report found.
And even though both Biden and Trump have placed tariffs on China to try to limit its ability to compete with U.S. firms, the country has out-maneuvered those barriers, expanding its footprint of factories around the world to access new markets.
The growth of Chinese influence abroad
In 2024, the U.S.-China Commission’s report to Congress “warned that if China can gain control of the market and benefit from corresponding jobs and investment in technologies that the world wants, it can assert economic leverage over other countries including the United States, ” Atlas summarized. And in the years since, and especially since the U.S. and Israel initiated war in Iran, this has largely come to pass.
Chinese companies have invested $136 billion in clean energy manufacturing outside of China, Atlas found, more than four times the U.S. total.
Foreign direct investment by companies from both countries peaked in 2024, though China’s dip in 2025 was less dramatic than that of the U.S.
Both China’s foreign direct investment and exports are across batteries, electric vehicles, solar, and wind, and its markets span the whole globe. The U.S. ranks fourth in foreign direct investment by Chinese companies, with battery investment dominating the market, with Malaysia, Hungary, and Indonesia all out ahead.
It’s becoming clear that China doesn’t necessarily need the U.S. market for its clean tech like it once did, even as Trump maintains and expands Biden-era trade restrictions.
When it comes to solar exports, for example, the U.S. isn’t even on the list of the top 20 countries China sends its technology to; according to Atlas, “Chinese companies have used other countries, particularly Southeast Asian countries, to find cost advantages and to avoid tariffs or other penalties on imports from China.” Those import relationships, the report continued, are prompting ever-closer ties to China and Chinese countries. The U.S. has not kept up in solar manufacturing, dropping to 26th place in the world from 2022 to 2024.
And it’s not just solar. 2025 was the U.S.’s first year of “net negative clean energy investment since at least 2012,” down $22 billion over the previous year. While there was a rapid increase in investments between 2021 and 2024, 2025 was plagued by project cancellations, resulting in $33 billion in lost investments. This was largely due to the impact of the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill undoing the incentives — and the momentum more generally — of 2021’s Inflation Reduction Act. The political swing took a toll especially on manufacturing.
In the meantime, though, China’s investments have been surging. The country has made clean energy manufacturing a part of its long-term strategic planning since the early 2000s, pursuing a national electrification strategy via successive five-year plans, and exceeding its non-fossil energy targets consistently. And crucially, it has stayed the course even as the U.S. has flip-flopped.
The impact, and prescience, of these investments is even more significant given the war in Iran. Demand for clean technology — including batteries, solar, electric vehicles, and wind power — has soared in the face of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and resulting oil price spike. Fossil fuels, it’s becoming increasingly clear, are subject to geopolitical crisis in a way that clean technologies are not.
As Latitude Intelligence analyst Nick Zenkin wrote in March, China’s “hedge was already in place,” as the country has “systematically reduced its dependence on fossil fuels — and increased its use of clean energy. By 2024, he pointed out that clean energy met 84% of the country’s electricity demand growth, setting it up to weather the impact of the war far better than the U.S.
This hedge extends to the dominance of the country’s technologies abroad. While it’s still early days, there is already evidence that demand for Chinese cleantech is spiking as a result of the war. Atlas pointed to preliminary data from Ember suggesting that Chinese exports of solar, EVs, and batteries in March 2026 were up 70% compared to the previous year — a trend that could continue as oil flows remain halted.
