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The math is simple. It starts with three facts. China has spent massive amounts to create very low-priced electricity at a rate several times the U.S. pace. It has built massive dams. The best example is the Motuo Hydropower Station on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet. No other nation could build a colossal project so fast. And China has extraordinary solar power supply. Do the large Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies pay for these? No. The central government largely does. China is a dictatorship, so things happen that way.
There are three ways China is poised to leap ahead in artificial intelligence.
The United States faces many headwinds in creating AI infrastructure.
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Next, China creates a science project like the one America did when we built the atomic bomb. The nation’s best scientists all work on one project: chips that rival those made by Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA). Reuters calls it China’s Manhattan Project. The news service reports, “Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance.” Much of the tech seems to have been “stolen” from Western companies.
Finally, China creates extremely advanced AI products, like those from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and OpenAI, which it then dumps into the market. The latest versions include DeepSeek-V3.2, which anyone in the public can use, and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, which is more for tech business operations. Chen Fang, a Chinese engineer who worked on the project, said, “People thought DeepSeek gave a one-time breakthrough, but we came back much bigger,” according to VentureBeat.
The Chinese could be lying, but experts with access to the DeepSeek products don’t think so. The Chinese can employ huge numbers of top experts to move forward even faster. There is no competition for talent like there is among America’s tech companies. No engineer in China is being paid $10 million to move from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) to Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META). China won’t allow it.
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It takes three years to build a data center in the United States, especially for large hyperscale projects. Ask Elon Musk.
U.S. data centers face a scarcity of electricity as builders attempt to bring data centers online quickly. Renewable energy has not scaled fast enough. This has forced America to return to coal generation. Environmental activists are trying to stop that.
In the U.S. AI data center builders will need hundreds of billions of dollars to build out infrastructure. That capital has to be raised somewhere. Tech companies and financial players are cobbling it together. Companies like Microsoft and Meta do not have enough capital to cover these expenses themselves. Blue Owl Capital just walked away from helping to fund an Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) data center project. Money is fickle.
Nearby residents and businesses oppose U.S. data centers. Data center power use can drive up electricity prices. The grid in some areas is too weak to supply the power. And politicians are starting to make electricity prices an issue. That can slow or kill data centers in some parts of the country.
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote, “An escalating artificial intelligence race between China and the U.S. is drawing comparisons to the Cold War, and is likely to be just as consequential.”
What happens to the valuation of Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other sector leaders if China starts to pull ahead? It is similar to what people worry about with an AI bubble.
How to Short the Entire AI Industry
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