{"id":490246,"date":"2026-01-03T20:59:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T20:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/490246\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T20:59:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T20:59:09","slug":"the-race-for-global-domination-in-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/490246\/","title":{"rendered":"The Race for Global Domination in AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Government officials in Hangzhou have grand ambitions to make their city in eastern China a global center for artificial intelligence\u2014and the funds to try to make it happen. In June, they pledged $140 million to subsidize AI firms that operate in town. Not to be outdone, Shanghai promptly followed in July with its own $140 million subsidy program, and inaugurated an \u201cAI innovation town\u201d two months later with low-cost office space for start-ups in the sector. In the south, Shenzhen was already doling out $70 million a year to support local AI firms and research, while Chengdu, in the west, invested $42 million in a start-up called Zhipu AI to bring a new model-training center and research facility to the city.<\/p>\n

This frenzied spending spree follows a playbook that has proved successful in many industries in China: The state acts as cheerleader, financier, and protector, uniting the country\u2019s bureaucrats, executives, and entrepreneurs in a mission that Beijing believes is vital to China\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s top-down approach has made the country the envy of much of the world when it comes to industries such as manufacturing and infrastructure construction. But AI\u2014and the technological innovation it demands\u2014is something different. \u201cThe Chinese government is struggling to figure out how to support\u201d the AI sector, Paul Triolo, a partner at the advisory firm Albright Stonebridge Group who specializes in Chinese technology, told me. The U.S. government, in contrast, \u201cis trying to get out of the way and create an environment in which capital markets and these very innovative companies can run with the ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matteo Wong: The AI industry is radicalizing<\/a><\/p>\n

That makes the contest for AI not just between engineers and algorithms but between China\u2019s centralized autocracy and America\u2019s decentralized democracy. It pits American private enterprise and its immense financial resources, talent, and creative energies against a Chinese government determined to dominate this new technology at any cost. The future of AI is too uncertain to know just yet which approach will win out. But as things stand, even the most disciplined and dedicated policy makers in China may struggle to compete with the wealth, expertise, and experience of America\u2019s private tech sector.<\/p>\n

Given the ways in which AI promises to reshape nearly every aspect of our lives, the stakes for this race are high. Whichever country claims the lead could gain an edge not just technologically and economically, but also diplomatically, militarily, and in any area that relies on ingenuity.<\/p>\n

In China, however, this race feels existential. After decades of robust growth, the country\u2019s investment-led economic engine is running on empty. The Communist Party plainly hopes that AI technology will offer a solution to the country\u2019s economic malaise\u2014a way to restore growth without resorting to the kinds of reforms that might loosen the party\u2019s grip on power. With its society aging and public discontent mounting, Chinese leaders are keen to put AI to work. If their strategy fails, the divisions between the party and public may deepen, leading to even greater repression and a more uncertain future.<\/p>\n

All AI companies are racing to develop smarter large language models and the expensive infrastructure to support them. But in the U.S., the strategy is primarily to build bigger and more powerful models as rapidly as possible, to hasten both the adoption and the profitability of AI. The ultimate ambition is to achieve \u201cartificial general intelligence,\u201d whereby a machine can match the cognition and problem-solving of a human brain.<\/p>\n

In China, the prevailing assumption is that AI models are already good enough to deliver benefits now. In August, the State Council, China\u2019s top governing body, pledged to promote<\/a> \u201cthe broad and deep integration of AI across all industries and areas of the economy and society\u201d by 2035. China\u2019s leadership wants every civil servant, lab scientist, factory manager, corporate executive, and army general to be harnessing AI asap.<\/p>\n

In the U.S., the hope is that artificial general intelligence \u201cwill provide a cross-sectoral advantage across the economy, across the military,\u201d Scott Singer, a fellow who focuses on technology at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. \u201cFor China, it\u2019s much more about how a conventional, meaningful boost to your economic, and perhaps military, productivity creates competitiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n

China\u2019s leaders have had their eyes fixed on AI for nearly a decade. In 2017, the State Council introduced<\/a> a national plan for AI development with the intention of \u201cmaking China the world\u2019s primary AI innovation center.\u201d The Chinese government has spent at least $200 billion over the past decade on supporting the AI sector. Adding related state funding for chips and other industries probably puts this sum at more than $300 billion, according to estimates from the Council on Foreign Relations using data from a study published<\/a> by the National Bureau of Economic Research. China now presents the only real threat to American leadership in AI.<\/p>\n

This kind of state muscle is great for making steel and cars, but it doesn\u2019t necessarily work when it comes to conceiving and adopting something as complicated as AI. \u201cIt\u2019s much harder for the government to almost mandate or just push through adoption at a large scale\u201d in AI versus other industries, Jeffrey Ding, a specialist on China\u2019s AI sector at George Washington University, told me. When it comes to infrastructure, \u201cyou can build the bridges; you can invest in high-speed rail.\u201d But to get people to use AI systems, \u201cit has to make sense for them from a profit perspective, from a market perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

More perniciously, China\u2019s leaders have also refused to liberalize the country\u2019s antiquated financial system. Bureaucrats have stunted the development of stock markets, and their distrust of private enterprise has scared off investors and venture capitalists. This means that Chinese AI companies cannot raise the kinds of funds that their American competitors do with ease. According to an analysis<\/a> by Ding based on data from a Chinese research institute, four top U.S. tech giants\u2014Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon\u2014have together invested over eight times more in data centers and other infrastructure necessary to support AI than China\u2019s seven leading internet companies combined. And state funding doesn\u2019t appear to be making up the difference.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s AI sector is further hobbled by Washington\u2019s curbs on selling advanced American AI chips to Chinese companies, because China\u2019s semiconductor industry is not yet capable of producing equivalent alternatives. Over the objections of many national-security experts, President Donald Trump has allowed the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia to sell more AI chips to China, but he has maintained the ban on the most powerful American chips, at least for now. Chinese efforts to boost its own chip industry have fallen short.<\/p>\n

These constraints place China\u2019s AI firms at a disadvantage. Experts generally agree that American AI models perform better than their Chinese competitors. Without sufficient investment or chips, the Chinese industry may never catch up. If an American firm does create an AI model that rivals human intelligence \u201cusing breakthrough technologies that others don\u2019t know, then they may really squash the rest of the world,\u201d Kai-Fu Lee, the chairman of the venture-capital firm Sinovation Ventures and an AI expert in China, told me.<\/p>\n

But the race is far from over. Despite these considerable obstacles, Chinese AI firms have proved adept at keeping pace with their richer U.S. peers. DeepSeek startled Silicon Valley last year with a model that rivals ChatGPT but built with far less money and computing muscle. The Chinese AI industry has also chosen to be \u201copen source,\u201d which means that the source code of models from DeepSeek and Alibaba is freely available to study, improve, and share, and is cheaper to use than U.S. alternatives, which are largely kept private.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe American approach is like, I\u2019m a genius; I\u2019m going to win the Nobel prize; I\u2019ll invent something and beat everyone to it,\u201d Lee said. \u201cThe Chinese approach is We\u2019re all good students; we\u2019re not geniuses; we\u2019re going to do our homework together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Schuman: DeepSeek and the truth about Chinese tech<\/a><\/p>\n

Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers are channeling their efforts into more practical applications of AI that promise a wider reach. About 70 percent<\/a> of users of a Chinese AI-video generator called Kling, for example, are outside China. Chinese companies are also moving quickly to capitalize on the country\u2019s vast manufacturing capacity by deploying AI in everyday objects, such as cars, eyeglasses, toys, and transcription devices. Tom van Dillen, the managing partner of the Beijing-based technology consulting firm Greenkern, told me that 17 of the top 20 car brands in China have integrated DeepSeek\u2019s AI into their models. \u201cThe ability to take a lot of these new technologies and put them into use in creative ways is superior\u201d in China than in the United States, he said.<\/p>\n

Given the questions that plague the future of AI, what may seem like clear-cut comparative advantages may prove not to be. Perhaps China\u2019s aggressive state spending, open-source AI coding, and interest in ordinary use cases for the technology will ultimately give the country an edge over American firms that are expensively chasing revolutionary applications for a more theoretical product. Perhaps the sheer diversity of AI and its potential applications makes it wrong to conceive of this competition between the U.S. and China as a winner-takes-all binary.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps this race will indeed reinforce which political and economic model best enables technological innovation: China\u2019s aggressive meddling or America\u2019s intensive enabling. The U.S. would seem to have the upper hand here, but it would be unwise to count China\u2014and the Communist Party\u2014out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Government officials in Hangzhou have grand ambitions to make their city in eastern China a global center for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":490247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-490246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115833180196927379","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}