China is “all in” on AI competition with the US – not only with huge investment capital but also with a comprehensive and long-term strategy. Here is the overall picture of this competition (updated to mid-2025).
 |
| Photo image TheEntire99 |
China currently has more than 200 domestic LLM models, of which ~80% are open source, aiming to “escape the US” from proprietary technologies.
US China The Bipolar AI War.
Field US China Supercomputer infrastructure AINVIDIA H100, TPUs (Google) bHuawei Ascend, Kunlun, Tianhe Supercomputer Software – LLMsGPT-4 (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google) Ernie, GLM, Baichuan, Chat GLM Open source Meta LLaMA, Mistral, Falcon Baichuan, Zhipu, InternLM Commercialization market SaaS, DevOps, Copilot, Chat bot Government services, education, surveillance, social networks Political control More freedom, self-regulation Very controlled: must be approved before going public AI exports Global (UK, Japan, EU) Belt and Road (Africa, Central Asia, ASEAN)
China's key focuses:
Self-reliance on AI chips → avoid dependence on NVIDIA (currently embargoed by the US)
AI applied to social surveillance and management (strong in areas such as Smart City, public security self)
Open source for “resonance of the whole people”, with hundreds of open source projects such as OpenBMB, FlagAI…
Current situation (2025):
The US is still leading in the most advanced models (GPT-4, Claude 3, Gemini 1.5)
China is narrowing the gap, especially thanks to:
Huge domestic data
Extremely strong education and R&D systems
State protection, control of the domestic market
💬 "The US leads in innovation, China leads in implementation" - is a popular comment today among global AI analysts.
China goes all-in on AI: Ambition of a technological superpower
1. National strategy: "AI 2030" - surpassing the US to become an AI superpower
Since 2017, China has issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" with the goal of:
"Leading the world in AI by 2030."
The government invests hundreds of billions of yuan in AI infrastructure, human resource training, and supports domestic AI startups.
2. Huge investment and state direction
National AI Fund: Beijing backs “AI giants” such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, SenseTime, iFlytek…
AI cities: Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai are becoming technology megacities with supercomputer centers, AI research institutes, and dedicated campuses for startups.
Supercomputers and domestic AI chips: China is promoting self-reliance in AI chip design (similar to Nvidia) through Cambricon, Biren, Huawei Ascend…
3. China's own large language models (LLMs)
China has developed a series of competitive LLMs ChatGPT:
Development Enterprise ModelCompared to GPT-4Ernie Bot BaiduRapid progress, close to GPT-3.5Tongyi Qianwenv Alibaba Enterprise orientation Sense Chat vSense Time Optimized for image recognition + GPT-likeGLM-4Zhipu AI (strong startup)Accelerating open source Baichuan 2Baichuan AI Top global open source.
