Washington increasingly frames artificial intelligence as a single decisive race toward general intelligence. China’s strategy points elsewhere. The danger is not building AI, but locking policy into a worst case narrative that turns uncertainty into irreversible escalation.
China’s artificial intelligence giants are not only dodging United States export controls. They are also navigating Beijing’s clampdown on Nvidia. New rules that bar fresh Nvidia deployments in Chinese data centres are pushing Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek to rent GPU farms in Singapore and Malaysia, even as they are forced to build a parallel stack on Huawei and other domestic chips at home.