After Trump's visit to the Middle East in May and the signing of important cooperation agreements in the field of artificial intelligence, David Sacks, a White House official responsible for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency affairs, stated that the massive advanced chip sales agreement signed by Trump with Gulf countries is a heavy blow to China, but a major gain for the United States and its partners.
From Sacks' perspective, these transactions represent the recognition of American technology as a global standard and the prevention of competitors (i.e., China) from catching up with the United States.
These remarks followed other similarly harsh statements made before Mike Waltz was appointed as the U.S. government's national security advisor (he was later removed prematurely), in which he said that his country would begin charging high fees and further hinder those countries that continue to monitor us (including China). The U.S. magazine Foreign Policy also commented that these remarks reflect a trend within the U.S. government to explicitly call on countries around the world to make clear choices between the technological advancement programs of the United States and China, rather than trying to take a middle ground.
These remarks are part of a larger conflict that could affect a significant portion of geopolitical competition in the first half of the 20th century. This is the artificial intelligence conflict between the United States and China, which is no exaggeration to say is one of the greatest challenges facing the United States today.
It either maintains its leadership in this field or paves the way for China to leap forward and control sensitive and decisive regions. Or, as David Sacks, the senior advisor to the White House on artificial intelligence and digital currencies, said, future armies will be composed of drones and robots and will be entirely controlled by artificial intelligence. He believes that only by uniting the entire world under the umbrella of American technology can the United States achieve its leadership.
The AI conflict between the United States and China is one of the greatest challenges facing the United States today (Reuters)
China's Technology Industry
Anyone who has paid attention to China's development in the 1990s may not have imagined that things would develop to this point, where this Asian country even threatens America's technological leadership. According to the Korean newspaper The Korea Times, China has gone through three main stages to become a strong competitor in the field of artificial intelligence that poses a threat to the United States.
Initially, the United States led the global internet revolution and occupied the dominant position through rapid innovation, capturing the global market. At that time, in the 1990s, China was just an observer in this new world, and later cautiously began to approach it through large-scale investments to expand its innovation in the digital economy.
Even at that stage, China was copying and imitating Western technology (this stage is called imitation), rather than innovating independently. Then, during the period from 2005 to 2015, stimulated by a significant increase in the number of internet users, China launched a large number of online services and entered the second stage of technological revival, the "improvement" stage.
As time went on, Chinese tech companies began to improve their services after fully understanding the nature of the market and users, preparing to enter the final stage of China's tech revival.
In this stage, Chinese companies no longer focused on imitation, following, and trying to emulate Western innovations, but also began to innovate close to, match, and even surpass foreign digital models. The unprecedented success of ByteDance's TikTok application is a clear example. The West clearly realized that China had entered a new stage, no longer accepting the status of follower and imitator, but taking the position of competitor, striving for leadership.
This is most evident in the field of artificial intelligence. After the release of the generative AI model ChatGPT in 2022, which caused a global sensation, China finally launched an AI innovation model called DeepSeek-R1 in early 2025 to compete with ChatGPT. Upon the announcement of this news, U.S. tech stocks plummeted, and Western tech stock exchanges lost tens of billions of dollars.
Regardless of the standards used, DeepSeek is a real shock and undoubtedly heralds a transformation in the AI market, which everyone thought was exclusively the domain of Western giants. Although the world's leading AI companies use supercomputers equipped with up to 16,000 advanced NVIDIA chips to train their chatbots, DeepSeek only needed 2,000 chips for training.
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, spent $5 billion to produce its AI model, while this Chinese company only spent $5.6 million to produce its model.
DeepSeek achieved remarkable results, causing a significant impact on the Western tech market. Although its usage cost is 30 to 50 times cheaper than the OpenAI model in the U.S., within a month of its launch, it managed to narrow the performance gap between China's and the U.S.'s best models from 9.3% to just 1.7%, and it reached 100 million users in seven days, whereas ChatGPT took two months to reach the same number.
The emergence of DeepSeek prompted President Trump to explicitly state that China's low-cost AI applications sound the alarm for American businesses. Trump said he must awaken the U.S. tech industry to focus more to win in this field.
In fact, given that the U.S. is currently in an emergency to counter its competitor China, Donald Trump met with officials from OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to discuss investing up to $50 billion in a new AI model called "Stargate."
Looking at it from a broader perspective, the U.S. has clearly seen DeepSeek as a national security threat, so Congress has passed a resolution banning the use of Chinese AI models in its offices, and is discussing a bill to prohibit the use of the app on any computer or phone in government agencies. Behind this threat lies profound issues and challenges that threaten America's technological advantage.
The biggest challenge is the growing gap in the number of engineers and technical personnel. According to The Korea Times, China trains four times as many students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as the U.S. every year, and has a strict and serious work ethic, in addition to a diversified industrial base and the generation of massive data.
All of this does not mention its decisive advantage in the energy required to drive the technology industry. In 2023, China generated 9,456 terawatt-hours of electricity, more than twice that of the U.S., equivalent to 32% of the global electricity generation, which means China has excellent capabilities to operate large data centers that are essential for running AI models.
The robot "Tiangong" participated in a half marathon in Beijing on April 19, 2025 (Getty Images)
As mentioned above, China has become a strong competitor of the United States in technology and artificial intelligence, and seems to be narrowing the gap with the U.S. at an increasingly faster pace and at lower costs.
Evidently, Donald Trump and his administration have realized this and are trying to hinder Beijing's efforts. In fact, both parties in the U.S. have recognized this danger. Therefore, according to the U.S. website Axios, despite the threats that AI development poses to employment and its role in increasing unemployment rates, which are serious for U.S. national security and sovereignty, they remain silent on the threats posed by AI development to employment and its role in increasing unemployment rates, although the CEO of the renowned AI development company Anthropic issued a statement warning that AI could increase the unemployment rate to 20% (five times the current rate) within the next five years, and eliminate at least half of the low-level office jobs.
But despite the interest of the Trump administration in this issue, there is a strong view that the policy of the U.S. president on this issue may backfire, inadvertently paving the way for China to win the intense AI war between the two sides.
The Impact of Trump
When U.S. President Donald Trump announced tariffs on foreign trade partners of the United States, AI stocks were among the ones most affected by this decision. At that time, U.S. platforms, newspapers, and analysts extensively discussed the potential damage this decision might cause to the AI field, while Trump hoped the U.S. would win the race against China.
For example, Chris Miller, the author of the best-selling book "Chip War," said that these tariffs greatly increased the cost of building AI data centers because AI servers usually need to be imported, thus requiring tariffs, and many other devices in data centers, including necessary cooling and power equipment, also require tariffs.
Experts revealed to Time magazine at the time that the tariffs would make the costs in the AI field very high, forcing some companies in the field to build their own data centers overseas. Time magazine also predicted that even if Trump took preventive measures to alleviate the burden on the data center industry, the overall impact of the trade war on the economic environment would eventually harm AI companies, as it would ultimately lead to an intensified economic recession, lack of liquidity for these companies, and a collapse in AI demand.
Microchips are a major focus of the Sino-U.S. competition (Reuters)
In summary, the escalation of the trade war and the excessive use of tariffs pose a significant risk to the competition between the United States and China in the field of artificial intelligence.
On the other hand, many analyses point to deeper issues: since the time of former President Biden, the U.S. has imposed punitive tariffs on China to control technology products, especially NVIDIA's computer chips, exported to China, but ultimately led to the enhancement of China's R&D capabilities, contrary to its original intention.
According to Axios in the U.S., NVIDIA's CEO Huang Renxun described the strict export control plan as a "failure" and provided internal incentives for China to develop its technology industry, making it unnecessary or dependent on American hegemony. He warned that if China could replace NVIDIA's chips with Huawei's chips for AI training, it could completely replace American technology globally, leading to the collapse of American technological superiority.
A research article published by the Carter Center in June stated that the business community in the U.S. generally believes that punitive export controls on China would enhance China's self-reliance and development in the chip sector.
Similarly, TRT World's visual news report attributed the secret of DeepSeek's strong rise to the efforts made by the U.S. to prevent China from advancing in the field of artificial intelligence. At the same time, the U.S. has implemented strict controls on the export of advanced chips used for AI to China since 2022, allowing only the export of low-quality chips. These U.S. controls forced China to become a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, not just a follower. Therefore, the U.S. strict regulations prompted the founder of DeepSeek to make significant innovative developments, ultimately producing results that shocked the West.
Additionally, according to Foreign Policy, the Trump administration is pushing the global digital technology field into a dangerous situation. The space for multilateral technology diplomacy no longer exists, and the U.S. government is handling this issue based on the principle of "America First." The U.S. goal is complete domination, not cooperation, and thus the U.S. is paving the way for a world dominated by "technological nationalism" based on fierce competition.
Therefore, many countries around the world, including the U.S. allies in Europe and even Canada, have begun to talk about establishing their own data centers and AI models.
For example, the European Commission appointed a technology sovereignty officer named Hanna Vilkunen, while the Dutch parliament explicitly passed a resolution aimed at reducing dependence on U.S. software. Canada also experienced this, as the country announced that it would reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.
Foreign Policy's analysis suggests that while Trump's policies may bring short-term benefits, they cannot maintain global dominance in the long term, as the U.S. policies will encourage different countries to pursue their own national technology futures.
Similarly, analysts from the U.S. website Axios believe that Trump's policies aim to exert great pressure on countries around the world, forcing them to choose between cooperating with China or working with China, thereby forcing them to submit to China's leadership. However, these analysts believe that this policy is a gamble that may not yield good results and could seriously affect the U.S. position in the AI competition with China. European countries, Canada, and other traditional U.S. partners are dissatisfied with Trump's trade policies, and their tendency to cooperate is stronger than their tendency to cooperate with the U.S. This atmosphere between the U.S. and its partners also creates a loophole that China can exploit. This will ultimately lead to cooperation between China and Europe under the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," which will severely harm the U.S. in the AI competition in the long run.
Finally, an article from The Korea Times gave a radical criticism of President Donald Trump's policies and their potential impact on the U.S. ability to win the AI competition. The article argues that Trump's policies represent a reversal of American openness, which laid the foundation for American leadership in the technology field.
For example, according to the Korean platform, the Trump administration fired 170 employees from the National Science Foundation in February, including AI experts. The U.S. government also proposed to cut the agency's budget by more than 50% and freeze approximately $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University. We haven't even mentioned Trump's anti-immigration policies, considering the possibility of a brain drain of technical talent, and how China's open cooperation in the AI field contrasts with America's closed policies, which could cause the U.S. to lose many important talents.
The article argues that the real issue is that Trump's policies of cutting research funding, increasing immigration restrictions, and granting power to large companies at the expense of small companies will ultimately benefit China in the long run and may put it in a favorable position in the AI competition, which is contrary to what Trump and his administration are pursuing and constantly promising.
Sources: Al Jazeera + Electronic Website
Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7530185651606651443/
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