The AI era has almost become a game between the US and China

Globally, AI has formed a duopoly pattern between the US and China. Only these two countries meet all six core conditions—compute power, massive data, capital, a complete industrial chain, talent, and an enormous market—while other countries have clear weaknesses and can only participate in supporting segments.
In terms of compute power, 90% of the world’s high-end AI compute is concentrated in the US and China. The US, Europe, the UK, and Japan lack a full domestic supply of high-end chips, making it difficult to build large-scale supercomputing clusters.
On the data side, the US and China have native billion-scale data that supports model iteration. The EU’s data regulations are strict, while Japan and South Korea have limited population and language scale, leaving insufficient training corpora.
On capital, Silicon Valley’s venture capital at the hundred-million-to-billion scale continues to invest. China is supported by national compute strategies and industrial funds, while European and US capital struggles to sustain long-cycle development of foundational models.
Top AI talent is highly concentrated in the US and China, and there are significant disparities in the scale of R&D teams elsewhere.
Development paths diverge:
The US controls GPUs and the underlying frameworks. Driven by corporate capital, it focuses on breakthroughs in general-purpose large models and is strong in original work at the base layer.
China relies on a complete manufacturing industry, focusing on industrial use and smart city deployment, while advancing independent substitution for chips and frameworks in parallel.
The EU can only set industry rules. Japan and South Korea focus on storage and precision hardware support. Emerging markets only import finished products for local adaptation. None of them can participate in core competition across the entire AI industry chain.
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