China is spending billions to become an AI superpower

The Star

12 hours ago

TAIPEI, Taiwan: When OpenAI blocked China's access to its advanced artificial intelligence systems last July, Chinese coders shrugged. They would rely instead on open-source systems, where the underlying technology is shared publicly for others to build on.
At the time, that mostly meant turning to another popular American product made by Meta.
But in the year since, there has been a major shift in the global race to develop advanced AI. Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Alibaba have churned out open-source AI systems of their own that rank among the world's top performers.
China is quickly closing the gap with the United States in the contest to make technologies that rival the human brain. This is not an accident. The Chinese government has spent a decade funneling resources toward becoming an AI superpower, using the same strategy it used to dominate the electric vehicle and solar power industries.
'China is applying state support across the entire AI tech stack, from chips and data centres down to energy,' said Kyle Chan, an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corp, a think tank.
For the past 10 years, Beijing has pushed Chinese companies to build manufacturing capabilities in high-tech industries for which the country previously depended on imports. That approach helped China become the maker of a third of the world's manufactured goods and a leader in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels. And it has also been applied to the essential building blocks of advanced AI systems: computing power, skilled engineers and data resources.
China pushed that industrial policy approach as three presidential administrations in Washington tried to hold back its ability to make technologies such as artificial intelligence, including by restricting sales of chips made by Nvidia, America's leading AI chipmaker.
On Monday, Nvidia said the US government had approved sales, with a license, of a China-specific chip known as the H20. But with Beijing's backing, Chinese companies like Huawei have been racing to develop alternatives to Nvidia's technology.
Beijing's approach to AI is intended to help Chinese tech companies make advancements despite Washington's restrictions.
In the United States, companies including Google and Meta have spent billions on data centers. But in China, it is the government that has played a major role in financing AI infrastructure and hardware, including data centers, high-capacity servers and semiconductors.
To concentrate the country's engineering talent, the Chinese government also financed a network of labs where much of its most advanced AI research takes place, often in collaboration with big tech companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance.
Beijing has also directed banks and local governments to go on a lending spree that fueled hundreds of startups. Since 2014, the government has spent nearly US$100bil (RM424.99bil) on a fund to grow the semiconductor industry, and in April said it would allocate US$8.5bil (RM36.12bil) for young AI startups.
Local governments have set up entire neighbourhoods that function as startup incubators, like Dream Town in Hangzhou, a city in China's south that is home to Alibaba and DeepSeek and is known as a hot spot for AI talent.
'For the government to help us cover even 10 or 15% of our early-stage research costs, that's a huge benefit,' said Jia Haojun, the founder of Deep Principle, a Hangzhou startup focused on using AI for chemical research that raised US$10mil (RM42.50mil) last year.
Different city districts offer competing incentives to lure startups to their areas. Deep Principle received a US$2.5mil (RM10.62mil) subsidy from a district in Hangzhou when the startup moved to the city, Jia said. A local official helped him find office space and employee housing.
American AI systems were built using information from all types of websites, including some that are inaccessible on China's censored internet, such as Reddit and Wikipedia. But Chinese companies need to make sure that any AI products used by the general public comply with Beijing's controls on information. So the government has created data resources that contain approved information for companies to use to train their AI systems, including one based on state media articles that is called 'the mainstream values corpus'.
Chinese tech companies also have an enormous amount of data on how people use the Internet, which has helped companies such as ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, develop some of the country's most popular AI systems.
Yet Beijing's industrial policy approach to AI has also been inefficient. An abundance of AI startups are vying for their piece of a cutthroat market, competing to offer their models at low rates to engineers.
This top-down approach also makes it burdensome to shift resources quickly as technology changes. Chinese companies spent years working on AI technologies such as facial recognition but were caught off-guard by the advances in generative AI behind ChatGPT.
'It can be difficult to figure out where to invest and allocate resources,' said Chan, the RAND researcher. 'AI is not like traditional industries like steel or shipbuilding, where the technology is fairly stable.'
Much of the government funding has gone to China's leading chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, which manufactures chips designed by companies including Huawei and Qualcomm. SMIC has raced to produce AI chips for Huawei that are intended to compete with ones made by Nvidia.
While Huawei chips may be good enough for some tasks, they cannot do everything Nvidia chips can do. Companies are also reluctant to make the switch because it is difficult for SMIC to manufacture them in large quantities.
'The idea is that in the event of being cut off, there is some viable alternative – even if it is lagging in performance – so China's AI industry can continue to make some progress instead of being stopped altogether,' Chan said.
Chinese companies are turning to open-source AI systems as the fastest way to catch up to rivals in Silicon Valley, which are thought to have at least a few months' lead over China's most advanced technology.
In the past year, Alibaba has released several popular open-source systems. ByteDance, which spent US$11bil (RM46.75bil) last year on data centers and other AI infrastructure, also published details about how it built some of its technology. This month, Huawei released an open-source system. Even Baidu, a Chinese internet company that previously praised the 'monetization potential' of closed AI products, recently released open-source versions of some of its systems.
While OpenAI and Google charge a premium for access to their closed AI systems, the Chinese approach of making models publicly available has made it easier for engineers around the world to build on their systems.
OpenAI has warned that Chinese AI companies such as DeepSeek could block American competitors from markets around the world, giving them the chance to set standards for how the new technology is used.
Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, has framed the competition between American and Chinese AI companies as ideological and said he wants to 'make sure democratic AI wins over authoritarian AI.'
The thinking is that China's approach may appeal to more engineers around the world.
'Open-source is a source of technological soft power,' said Kevin Xu, the U.S.-based founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in AI technologies. 'It is effectively the Hollywood movie or the Big Mac of technology.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.