The U.S. Poured Billions Into AI. China Just Made It All Irrelevant.
America’s AI strategy was simple: outspend everyone, hoard chips, build bigger data centers. It was supposed to create an insurmountable lead. Instead, China caught up by doing the one thing we never expected — learning to train world-class models with a fraction of our resources. The U.S. didn’t lose the AI race by underinvesting. It lost by confusing brute force with a real strategy.