China is running multiple AI races

While the US chases AGI, China is more focused on efficiency, adoption, and physical integration

I’ve just published a new piece with Brookings looking at how China’s AI strategy differs from the US focus on the race to AGI.

Excerpt below — read the full piece here (free)

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The United States is obsessed with the “race to AGI” or artificial general intelligence. American tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new data centers in the hopes of creating AI systems that can match or exceed human-level performance across most cognitive tasks. America’s “Big Four” hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—have collectively announced AI spending totaling $650 billion this year, with overall U.S. spending on AI compute infrastructure projected to surpass $2.8 trillion by 2029.

China’s AI companies are playing a different game. While they are also rushing to build world-class foundation models, the notion of “AGI” as some abstract turning point in human history is less discussed, with some exceptions, such as DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng and Alibaba’s CEO Eddie Wu. Instead, Chinese AI developers are racing along other axes of progress: efficiency, adoption, and physical integration, driven by both industry constraints and Beijing’s policy focus. Taken together, China’s approach is a fundamentally different bet on how AI will shape the future…

→ Continue reading (free): China is running multiple AI races

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