The race for artificial intelligence: China’s next shock is coming

China is presenting artificial intelligence as a public good while the United States fuels an extraordinary investment boom with ever-higher profit expectations. When President Xi Jinping opened the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July, he framed the country as a force for the future: “Today we are gathering to discuss how to advance AI globally, for the benefit of humanity.”

The message also serves as a pointed contrast with the United States. An analysis by the Financial Times found that Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta alone have earmarked around $745 billion for AI infrastructure this year. Their freely available profits, however, have fallen to $7 billion, the lowest level of the past decade.

That imbalance is feeding fears well beyond a possible stock-market crash. The concern is also about a future in which artificial intelligence could reshape the world without control. In the United States, opposition to new data centers is intensifying, even if complaints focus publicly on water use and noise.

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Today we are gathering to discuss how to advance AI globally, for the benefit of humanity.

Beijing’s rhetoric sounds like an alternative to Silicon Valley, and the article argues that reality partly supports the comparison. Chinese startups DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have brought models to market with a fraction of the capital, while offering performance that is nearly as strong at much lower cost. Their trained parameters can also be downloaded freely.

“This next China shock will come through AI,” wrote Lizzi C. Lee of the Asia Society. She links China’s approach to years of industrial policy. Earlier, the country flooded global markets with textiles and inexpensive consumer electronics. In the next phase, the article says, the same formula has been applied to electric cars, robots and solar panels. Now artificial intelligence models could become the next global Chinese export.

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This next China shock will come through AI.