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6 min read Technology

The jagged frontier

Feature: Who’s got the best AI? Selina Xu on America’s intelligence explosion—and China’s “dark factories.”
—Gustav Jönsson, Selina Xu
The jagged frontier
Marek Piwnicki

Last year, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced the creation of the Stargate Project, he called it "the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history." The group behind Stargate—OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and the United Arab Emirates’ government-owned investment firm MGX—has pledged some US$500 billion. How much they’ll actually invest may still be unclear, but a pledge like that already means ambition and scale.

According to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025, corporate AI investment soared to $252.3 billion in 2024, with private investment surging by 44.5 percent.

Last summer, the White House released a report entitled “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan”—the race being “to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence.” Which is to say, the stakes couldn’t be higher: “Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.”

And there’s tough competition. A year ago, China’s DeepSeek shocked American markets when it released a chatbot that matched American models at a fraction of their cost.

So who’s winning this race now?

Selina Xu is a writer and researcher based in New York, focusing on China and emerging technologies. Xu says the question assumes something: that the two countries are trying to do the same thing with AI. And largely, they’re not.

There is some overlap—DeepSeek’s chatbot competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and other leading chatbots—but mainly, the Chinese government isn’t trying to push the frontiers of intelligence. It’s trying to integrate AI throughout the economy to boost productivity. The Chinese economy has struggled in recent years—not least its real estate market—so Beijing is looking for new growth drivers, and it’s betting on AI. Already, the Chinese are building factories that can run without workers.

Meanwhile, American companies have bet big on having the best AI software. The idea is that once the program gets good enough, it’ll reach a stage where it can improve itself, leading to massive intelligence gains—and ultimately, massive financial gains for whichever company and country controls it …

Gustav Jönsson: How would you characterize the American AI strategy?

Simone Dinoia

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