China Prepares to Wreck US AI Industry

2 hours ago 2

Douglas A. McIntyre

Thu, December 18, 2025 astatine 9:15 AM CST 4 min read

The mathematics is simple. It starts with 3 facts. China has spent monolithic amounts to make precise low-priced energy astatine a complaint respective times the U.S. pace. It has built monolithic dams. The champion illustration is the Motuo Hydropower Station connected the Yarlung Tsangpo River successful Tibet. No different federation could physique a colossal task truthful fast. And China has bonzer star powerfulness supply. Do the ample Chinese artificial quality (AI) companies wage for these? No. The cardinal authorities mostly does. China is simply a dictatorship, truthful things hap that way.

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Next, China creates a subject task similar the 1 America did erstwhile we built the atomic bomb. The nation’s champion scientists each enactment connected 1 project: chips that rival those made by Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA). Reuters calls it China’s Manhattan Project. The quality work reports, “Chinese scientists person built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a instrumentality susceptible of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that powerfulness artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons cardinal to Western subject dominance.” Much of the tech seems to person been “stolen” from Western companies.

Finally, China creates highly precocious AI products, similar those from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and OpenAI, which it past dumps into the market. The latest versions see DeepSeek-V3.2, which anyone successful the nationalist tin use, and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, which is much for tech concern operations. Chen Fang, a Chinese technologist who worked connected the project, said, “People thought DeepSeek gave a one-time breakthrough, but we came backmost overmuch bigger,” according to VentureBeat.

The Chinese could beryllium lying, but experts with entree to the DeepSeek products don’t deliberation so. The Chinese tin employment immense numbers of apical experts to determination guardant adjacent faster. There is nary contention for endowment similar determination is among America’s tech companies. No technologist successful China is being paid $10 cardinal to determination from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) to Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META). China won’t let it.

It takes 3 years to physique a information halfway successful the United States, particularly for ample hyperscale projects. Ask Elon Musk.

U.S. information centers look a scarcity of energy arsenic builders effort to bring information centers online quickly. Renewable vigor has not scaled accelerated enough. This has forced America to instrumentality to ember generation. Environmental activists are trying to halt that.