China Might Win the AI Race Against the US. Here's Why.

Last week, I had coffee with a university teacher from Shanghai. She showed up carrying a book called How AI Is Changing Education, written by a Chinese professor. 

"We all have to take AI training now. Even literature teachers like me!"

That got me thinking. China is going all-in on AI—not just in tech labs, but in classrooms, government offices, and factories.

Meanwhile, I keep reading a lot of news: both China and the United States are spending huge sums to attract AI talent and to teach coding in elementary schools.

That made me think. Who will win the AI race? (Sorry, my fellow Germans, it probably will not be Europe 🙂)

Four Reasons China Could Pull Ahead

• Whole of nation focus. Beijing treats AI as strategic. It funds chips, data centers and mandatory AI training for teachers and officials, creating a single push from classrooms to supercomputers. 

• Resilient compute supply. Despite US export controls, China combines domestic Huawei processors with renewed access to Nvidia H20 GPUs, so its labs keep the servers running. 

• Deep talent bench. Chinese researchers already account for a large share of all AI papers, and universities send even more graduates into the field each year. If US momentum slows, this workforce could close the gap quickly. 

• Fast open innovation. Low-cost open weight models like DeepSeek spread fast through China’s lively developer community, letting start-ups and state firms build new apps at high speed and low cost.

Sources: Axios, Bloomberg.com, MERICS

The Bottom Line

The U.S. leads in breakthroughs (ChatGPT, Gemini), but China’s scale + execution could dominate real-world deployment from education to surveillance to EVs.

🌏 What’s your take? Will China outpace the U.S., or will American innovation keep the crown?

Stay curious, 

Thomas