For many of us, it wouldn’t be surprising if, in the not-so-distant future, the global center of gravity for AI shifted from Silicon Valley to a Chinese city like Shenzhen or Beijing.
A series of telling developments in 2025 suggests that China is mounting a serious challenge to the United States' long-standing dominance in artificial intelligence.
The Chinese AI lab DeepSeek captured global attention in early 2025 when its chatbot app surged to the number one spot on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. This “DeepSeek moment” took technologists and Wall Street analysts by surprise. The company—relatively unknown at the time and based in Hangzhou—delivered an AI model on par with its Western counterparts, but developed at a significantly lower cost.
But the rise of DeepSeek has broader implications.
First, it validated China’s AI strategy focused on computational efficiency: training large-scale models using less advanced hardware.
Second, by open-sourcing its …
