The Real Reason China Is Winning AI Has Nothing to Do With Chips

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Politicians have been incredibly late to wake up to the anger around AI. Artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. What happened? There's no doubt that we have been reckless in our pursuit of AI, but increasingly, these fears are putting us at risk of losing the AI race to China. China has twice as much energy as we have as a nation, and our economy is larger than theirs. Losing the AI race to China would be existential for the US. As many people have said before me, whoever wins AI wins, full stop. The China-US competition is the defining competition of your generation, my generation, of our age. We are just a short time away from a true superintelligence. The first country that gets there in a hard-to-catch-up scenario would have an enduring advantage, and that the US and China are both pell-mell in a race to do it. Whoever develops a substantial lead in intelligence can outmaneuver all of their opponents across every dimension. Cyber warfare, intelligence, armed conflict, economic growth, and so much more. And it's not obvious who's going to win between the US and China. The rate at which AI is being deployed into everything, digital, mechanical, and so forth, is astounding. While America used to be the place where things got made, the harsh reality is that a key decision we made decades ago is now causing the US to fall behind on a handful of critical metrics that are going to undermine the quality of our future. So in this video, I want to break down the mistakes that we're making around AI, why Americans hate it more with each passing day, why we're about to lose the most important lead in the most important technological race in human history, and what we need to do to get back on track. Let's start with the numbers because they are brutal. In a 2026 Gallup survey of 37 countries, 93% of people in China who know about AI said it would mostly help their country. In America, only 36% of people believe it will be good for the country. That ranked us below Afghanistan. A full 74% of Americans said they're actively worried about AI. Of all the countries surveyed, we scored highest on fear. In America, AI is increasingly seen as a threat that needs to be defeated. But in China, it's seen as a promising new technology that's going to give them an advantage. And it is. Pew recently asked Americans how important it is that the US leads the world in AI, and fewer than half, just 43%, said it was extremely or even very important. Here's the danger in that gap. Winning the AI race against China is going to be brutally difficult and expensive no matter what. Now imagine trying to win if people doubt the importance of the technology and or are openly hostile towards it. What are the odds that we win in that scenario? It's effectively zero. So how did America, the maverick nation that celebrated entrepreneurship, growth, and winning, end up resenting the most revolutionary new technology the world has ever seen? A technology in which they have the lead. We got here by being reckless. Reckless with our debt-fueled AI infrastructure build-out. Reckless with our youth. Reckless with our national character. And reckless with the whole economy. And the weapon that has fueled all of this recklessness is debt. I can explain. Because we print the world's reserve currency, we've been able to borrow and consume far more than we produce. The extras were supplied to us by cheap Chinese imports, and the more we bought from them, the more factory jobs left the US and went to China. This greatly diminished our actual productive economy, weakened the bargaining power of American workers, and ultimately hollowed out the middle class. Our next trick was to grow the welfare state, which armed politicians, with an easy way to get elected. Promise free stuff. And since the middle class was already struggling due to cheap imported labor and jobs being sent overseas, they of course voted for it. Being able to print the world's reserve currency let us run massive deficits and pay for all of it by taking out more debt. $40 trillion and counting. This fueled the flywheel of inflation, robbed our children's future by burying them under debt, and sped up the expansion of the welfare state. And all of that exacerbated wealth inequality and started fueling the resentment that we now see. Has anyone else noticed that as AI has gotten better, Mark Zuckerberg has started dressing more human? He started this conversation saying superlatives, it's why people loathe you. I mean, some people do loathe you. Yes, some people do. This also created a massive incentive to financialize everything so that there were plenty of non-inflatable assets for the elites, who understand the global economy, to escape to, to avoid the disastrous effects of deficits and a large welfare state. As such, the rollout of AI has to be done in a way that builds excitement for the future, not terror. But instead, Silicon Valley has just put its head down and built data centers as fast as humanly possible with virtually no positive storytelling whatsoever, regardless of the mounting anxieties, regardless of actual mounting costs. They've done nothing to mitigate that. If the economy were growing robustly, good paying jobs were everywhere, and young people were thriving, maybe you could get away with that level of recklessness. But when inflation has been outpacing real wage growth for decades, when inflation has become absolutely unbearable since COVID, when we're all saddled with an insane national debt and many have insane student debt on top of it, when people can't afford a home till they're in their 40s, and when a war is driving up the cost of energy and data centers are doing it as well, when AI is threatening to take your job and when AI is driving up the cost of anything that requires a memory chip, you absolutely must invest time in getting people excited about AI and making sure that the build out of a data center lowers their costs and doesn't take them up. It doesn't even matter that the technology will almost certainly make everything cheaper and extend human life two of the biggest wishes that anybody would have for themselves. When people aren't even convinced that a growing human population is a good thing, don't be surprised when they push back on a technology that promises to extend human life, especially not if they perceive that AI is going to make their lives worse in the short term for a whole host of reasons. Now, it's inevitable that people, and not just young people, will watch Elon become the first trillionaire on the back of AI while they struggle to buy groceries or pay their electric bill, and they're gonna ask themselves, what exactly do I get out of AI? And imagine how they feel when the answer that comes back is you're getting warehouses full of chips that nobody's even using because that's what's actually happening right now. AI is driving up the cost of so many things, and yet the buying frenzy is just resulting in warehouses full of unused chips. It's crazy making. Amazon is spending billions of dollars every month on buying new AI servers, locking up unimaginable amounts of memory only to turn around and put it all in storage. And they're not the only ones. At Big Tech, there's more than $230 billion worth of AI chips that are sitting unused. Microsoft's own CEO, Satya Nadella, admitted last November that his problem isn't a shortage of chips, it's chips sitting in inventory that he can't plug in. And here's the wild part. Despite the fact that they can't use them, they're still buying more and ignoring the fact that that causes prices to keep going up for the average person. And this new gold rush is pushing up prices across the economy. JP Morgan economists estimate some memory chip costs could rise as much as 400% from 2024 through the end of this year. Apple raised laptop and iPad prices by 15 to 25%, blaming the, quote, rapid expansion of AI data centers. In the US, electricity prices rose 5.9% in a single year, faster than inflation overall, and many economists expect AI spending to add about half a percentage point to core inflation by year end. Your power bill is part of it too. On PJM, the grid that serves 67 million Americans, the Independent Market Monitor says data centers added about $6.3 billion in costs in the latest power auction alone and more than 29 billion across the last four. Every customer on that grid pays a piece of that increase in price. In Virginia, the data center capital of the world, home electricity prices are up 11% in a year when they should be coming down because the data center should be carrying the cost of bringing on new electricity. So why are these companies continuing to spend when we don't even have the electricity to bring what they're buying online? Because for big tech, falling behind is way scarier than wasting money. As Metas Mark Zuckerberg put it, if we end up misspending a couple hundred billion dollars, I think that's going to be very unfortunate, obviously, but he added, the risk is higher on the other side. And when you spend like that, you need customers fast. Whether they ask for AI or not, whether they're excited about it or not, whether they're afraid or excited, you gotta get the customers. When Microsoft folded its co-pilot AI into Microsoft 365, it raised the price by $3 a month for something that people may not have even wanted. When you start taking people's prices up for something they actively don't want, you've got a real problem. According to Pew, about six in 10 Americans want more control over how AI is used in their lives. Having it force-fed to them is not making AI any friends. Now, credit where credit's due, millions of people do use these tools and like them a lot, and it warrants saying that we are way past the skeptical phase of AI. It is by far already the most powerful technology that humans have ever created, and it's still getting better fast. But forcing it on a skeptical public is not the way to win friends and influence people, especially not if the very thing that's being forced upon them is also threatening to take their jobs. Americans aged 22 to 27 with a college degree had an unemployment rate of 5.6% this past spring, which is well above the national rate of 4.2%, according to the New York Fed. For most of modern history, a degree meant you were less likely to be unemployed than everyone else, but not anymore. A Census Bureau study found that early career employment in the industries most exposed to AI fell 12% in the 10 quarters after ChatGPT launched. Just getting a foot in the door has gotten much harder. In a recent greenhouse survey, 81% of American job seekers said they'd been rejected in the past year without ever speaking to a human. Among Gen Z applicants, 38% said it happens frequently. So people are pushing back, and they're taking it out on the most visible target in this troubled economy, data centers. In a Gallup poll this spring, 71% of Americans opposed an AI data center in their area. That's more than the 53% who opposed a nuclear plant. In the first half of this year alone, local opposition blocked or delayed nearly $200 billion in data center projects. Over just one weekend in July, there were 142 protests across 42 states. It's gotten so bad that OpenAI is now trying to rename data centers compute campuses to try to shake some of the stigma. And in the recent elections, 40 of the 41 local initiatives around throttling AI data center build-outs passed. The fact that the AI companies need to do something to shake a growing stigma is not a good sign. A country that fights its own AI infrastructure build-out is very. unlikely to win the AI race, especially when their primary rival is excited about building out theirs. In August of 2025, China launched its AI Plus plan, with the target of putting AI into more than 70% of the economy by 2027, and more than 90% by 2030. If you want a message to spread, teach it relentlessly in the classroom. And that's exactly what China's doing. Since September of 2025, every school in Beijing has had to teach AI, starting at age 6. It's mandatory. It's for every student. America's approach was an executive order that created no new funding and left the curriculum up to the states, where there's absolutely no consensus on how we should move forward. All right, fine. So be it. That is the American system. But in Beijing, AI classes start in first grade nationwide. That pipeline is already paying off for China. According to a September 2026 Carnegie study, 57% of the world's elite AI researchers got their undergraduate degrees in China, compared with 13% in America. And China now employs 41% of the entire world's elite AI researchers, while America employs just 34%. Three years ago, it was America at 46% and China at 27%. And the share of Chinese educated researchers who remain in China jumped from 57% to 69% over that same stretch. We might be ahead right now, but China's moving faster and they are rapidly closing that gap. And at this rate, our lead is not going to last very long. Two years ago, it looked like China was a year or two behind. Now it looks like they're six months behind. Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag, but Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories. They skip the middlemen and sell 100% Mongolian cashmere, starting at just 60 bucks, 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Now I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else. 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America used to be the world's heavyweight champion of building, but China now has that crown. It is one of America's greatest fumbles. In 1947, America's own Bell Labs invented the transistor, the grandfather of every AI chip on the planet. In 1956, Congress approved an interstate highway system that has since grown to nearly 49,000 miles. Through the 1950s and 60s, American electricity generation grew 5% to 10% a year, doubling about every decade. And when we decided to go to the moon, we got there in just eight years. But then we started to globalize and the factory started leaving. American manufacturing jobs peaked at 19.6 million in 1979, and by 2019, more than a third of those jobs were gone. For much of the 20th century, America made about a quarter of the world's manufactured goods, but by 2030, that share is expected to reach an abysmal 11%. China now makes more than a quarter of the world's goods, and they have the energy infrastructure that no one can match. And that gap is going to matter with AI. Some of the large power transformers needed for AI now take up to four years to arrive in the U.S., and American manufacturers still rely heavily on imports for the specialized steel that they require. And on top of all of that, there's one critical piece to AI that China is just absolutely destroying the U.S. on. Remember those AI chips that Amazon's just got sitting in warehouses? Well, according to Business Insider, some of them are sitting there because Amazon's data center sites don't have enough power to turn them on. For about 20 years, America's energy policies have just been moronic, and because our productive economy was essentially flat, our electricity needs were flat. That made us complacent, and we started behaving like we would never need a bigger power grid. In 2022, it was forecast that we'd need just 24 gigawatts of new peak demand over the next five years, but by November of just 2025, that figure had leapt to 166 gigawatts, which is enough to power roughly 125 million homes. More than half of that projected new demand comes from data centers. And worse, we're already falling behind the energy demands that we have right now today. Last December, PJM's auction for future power came up 6,600 megawatts short of what it needs just to keep the lights on reliably for the first time in its history. In July, it fell short again. As PJM's Stu Bressler put it, data center demand continues to far outstrip new supply. This past January, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, the Northeast, and Texas could all face a high risk of power shortfalls before the end of the decade. And the grid we do have is old and needs updating. In its 2025 report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave American energy infrastructure a D+, down from a C-, four years earlier, and estimated an investment gap of at least $578 billion by 2033. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy projects that about 104 gigawatts of power plants will retire by 2030. If that power isn't replaced in time, the Department of Energy warns blackouts could go from a few hours a year to more than 800 hours a year. So why doesn't America build more power plants? Because we've never met a regulation we didn't like. We're headed in that same direction that Europe's going. As of now, every new plant has to wait in line to connect to the grid, and the queue is enormous. At the end of 2025, over 2,000 gigawatts of power projects were just waiting to connect. Getting from request to operation typically takes more than five years. And of all the new capacity that applied to be brought online between 2000 and 2020, only about 13% overcame all of the regulatory hurdles and actually got built. And then, to add insult to injury, the projects that do manage to run the gauntlet and make it through still can't get the machines that they need to run the plants. GE Vernova, one of the world's biggest makers of gas turbines, has 122 gigawatts of turbines ordered or reserved and is already selling slots for 2030. And Goldman Sachs estimates America needs more than 207,000 more grid workers to add the power it needs by 2030. And we're nowhere near that number. Then, there's the power source America foolishly gave up on, nuclear. Nuclear was supposed to be the next leap, but dozens of reactor projects were canceled in the 70s and 80s. And after 1996, America went 20 years without a single new reactor coming online. When we finally tried again, construction started in 2009, the two reactors were finished seven years late and nearly 100% over budget. They ended up being the most expensive power project in U.S. history. We've just lost our can-do spirit. The one that took us from the very first flight ever to landing on the moon in just under 66 years. Now, just to get a single power line approved can take longer than it took America to build the Hoover Dam, literally. The Hoover Dam went from groundbreaking to completion in about five years. The 550 mile Sunzia transmission line took more than 17 years just to get approved. We no longer play to win. We've become so complacent. We no longer have a sense of urgency. Just an average federal environmental review takes 3.8 years. And if an energy project gets sued, litigation has another 3.9 years on average. And that's one of the many things hitting AI right now. Project Jupiter, for example, an Oracle-anchored AI data center campus in New Mexico, has had its gas pipeline right-of-way denied twice, pushing the pipeline go live to February of 2027. Elon Musk sees where all of this is headed. At the World Economic Forum this past January, he warned, quote, very soon, maybe even later this year, we'll be producing more chips than we can turn on, except for China. In 2025 alone, China added roughly 540 gigawatts of power capacity. That's about 260 Hoover Dams worth in a single year. Since 2021, China has added more power capacity than America has added in its entire history. And China is building every kind of power all at once. Last year, it brought on a record 95 gigawatts of coal power onto the grid. In December 2025 alone, it installed more grid batteries than America did all year. And in July of 2025, it started building a $167 billion dam in Tibet that's about three times the size of its own Three Gorges Dam, already the biggest power plant on earth. All that building means China has power to spare. Goldman Sachs estimates China will have about 400 gigawatts of spare power by 2030, roughly three times what every data center on earth is expected to need. Then there's nuclear. China has 36 reactors under construction, nearly half of all reactor construction in the world is happening in China. And China keeps approving more, 11 in 2024, 10 in 2025, and 8 more this past summer. And its Zhangzhou 1 reactor went from groundbreaking to full operation in just 5 years. And all of that delicious power makes electricity cheap. Chinese data centers can pay less than half of what American data centers pay. But instead of building, America is trying to buy its way to the lead. America's four biggest tech companies are on track to spend about $740 billion on AI this year. That's about 2.5% of the entire US economy, and almost exactly equal to what we spend on our military. China's biggest tech companies, on the other hand, are only expected to spend about $140 billion, according to Moody's. The American giants are being forced to outspend them roughly six to one, and doing so is burning through their cash at record pace. Amazon's infrastructure chief described the company's AI business as, quote, hugely free cash flow negative, and expects it to stay that way for the next couple of years or so. Alphabet went negative $5.9 billion in a single quarter. Oracle went negative $5.4 billion in its latest fiscal first quarter, and plans to raise around $40 billion more in debt and equity. AI cloud company, Corweave, grew its debt from $21 billion to $35 billion in six months, and has seen its credit rating fall like a rock. Even Meta has flipped. A year ago, it generated $10.6 billion in free cash flow. The last quarter, it burned $2.1 billion. The question becomes, if this is a race, is our spending gaining us sufficient advantage to actually be worth it? Because according to Epoch AI, Chinese models have trailed America's best by an average of 7 months since 2023. As of March 2026, the top American model led the top Chinese model on one of the most-watched leaderboards by just 2.7%. So America is spending 6x as much to stay only about 7 months and a tiny percentage ahead? The US tried to cut China off from our most advanced chips, but the squeeze actually served to make China more efficient and they are reaping the financial benefits. In January of 2025, the Chinese lab DeepSeek released a model that rivaled America's best, reportedly trained on about 2,000 downgraded Nvidia chips. Some controversy around that, but on the same day, its app shot past ChadCPT to become the number one free app in America. There's no doubt about that. And Nvidia lost $589 billion on the news. China has found an even cheaper shortcut as well, learning from our models through a method known as distillation. And now, China's replacing American chips with their own homegrown chips. This January, Washington also loosened the rules to let Nvidia sell some of its H200 chips in China again. But Beijing told its companies to buy them only in exceptional circumstances. And according to reports, shipments have added up to less than 1% of Nvidia's data center revenue. In September, Huawei's chairman claimed their homegrown AI chips had passed Nvidia in China. And according to the Financial Times, some local governments are offering to cut data center power bills by up to 50%, but only if those data centers run on Chinese chips. So, America's spending the most, burning the most cash by far, using the best chips, and is still only leading by a matter of months, while China copies what works, gives it away, and runs it on cheap power. That's what we're getting wrong about AI. We're trying to buy our way to the lead instead of building our way to the lead, while China is building. And at this rate, China doesn't need to beat us in the AI race, we're beating ourselves. This idea is going to be a little harder to explain, but stick with me because it is critical to the problem that we're facing in our race against China for AI supremacy. In the mid-1960s, a group of French philosophers delivered what came to be known as French theory to Americans for the first time. Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, and Michel Foucault were the primary drivers of this ideology. Their argument was simple and entirely corrosive to the spirit that made America the most prosperous and individually uplifting nation the world has ever seen. It goes like this. Every institution you trust, the school, the court, the hospital, the family, is a system of power pretending to be neutral. Truth is simply the made-up lies of whoever is in power. And these narratives are taught in the schools, so whoever controls the schools controls the narrative. So to take over a country, you need only take over the schools. Over time, several ideas were balled together with the French theory into what we now call critical theory, and they began being taught in schools all over the country. The core idea is that there is an oppressor group and an oppressed group, and the institutions that look neutral are actually built to serve the oppressor, and the categories that everyone takes for granted merit, objectivity, the nuclear family, biological sex, etc. are merely social constructions that protect the current power structure. Over the next 30 years, professors taught this self-defeating slop as the founding story of America. Slavery was no longer a global phenomenon corrected for in the U.S. by America's ideal that all men are created equal. Instead, American kids were taught that racism is uniquely America's foundation. Derrick Bell, the father of critical race theory, wrote in 1992 that racism is a permanent, indestructible part of American society. Not a human trait that's shared all over the world, an American trait, not a bug, but the precise operating system that drives the U.S. Burying kids under a mountain of debt, stealing from them through inflation, and then teaching them a self-defeating story about the foundations of this nation have created generations of citizens that are increasingly wary of ambition itself. One of the very things that made this nation great and prosperous. When people don't believe in their country, they're not going to fight for it to win. And as I said before, when it comes to AI, winning matters. It's no wonder that people are turning on AI. Their default view of merit and competition is that they are merely symptoms of a sick society that's been hijacked by people who want to oppress others. It isn't true, but that's the narrative. That puts us in a very weak position compared to a nation like China that believes in itself and believes that it is destined for greatness. And so it's going to do whatever it takes to be great. And it's not like we need a crystal ball to see where our current path will lead us. Europe is just us, but 10 years in the future, suffering from the same sense of guilt and loss of faith in itself. England, France, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, all of them former world powers that have since fallen and traded the pursuit of greatness for a managed decline and a fear of using too much energy. Europe is actively choosing regulation over building. And it shows in the data. In April of 2023, Germany shut down its last three nuclear power plants, which supplied about 6% of its power. Europeans now often pay twice as much or more for electricity as Americans. In some of Europe's biggest data center hubs, connecting to the grid takes seven to 10 years. In October, Microsoft walked away from a planned AI data center in England after being told it couldn't get power until the 2030s. Former European Central Bank Mario Draghi called Europe's position an existential challenge. They are a continent of more than 400 million people, and yet they've dropped out of the most important race of the century. America would be a fool to follow in their footsteps. Besides, we can't afford that fate. We're essentially betting our entire economy on AI. In October, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, warned, we now have an economy that is standing on one leg, the AI leg. In a scenario laid out by the IMF, if the AI boom stumbles, America will take a harder hit than anyone, with GDP falling 1.8% by 2028, compared to 1.1% for the rest of the world. In that scenario, everyone in the US gets hurt. Even if you hate AI, it would be unwise to hope for its downfall. And if we continue to teach kids that this country is irredeemably evil, that humans as a species are a cancer on the planet, and that we should be more like Europe, they will continue to seek safety and stagnation over innovation, and they will continue to view the most promising new technology as a tool of theft and oppression, rather than thinking of the amazing things they could build with it. If we want to fix this and get back on track, we must reinvigorate all Americans with a belief in this country and themselves. We need to re-embrace our maverick spirit and our unapologetic pursuit of greatness. We need permits measured in months, not decades. We need to connect new power plants to the grid at a rate that would make China blush, and we need to go nuclear again, at scale and on schedule and budget. Blue wave or not, we need to strip the bureaucratic nightmare that has slowed us to a crawl, and get back to building and playing to win. We need to pass legislation that unleashes creativity and innovation in energy, and we need to remember that losing the AI race could come at a cost that none of us should be willing to pay. The AI companies need to buckle down. They need to tell a compelling story about AI, prove to people that it matters to them, show that it's going to lower their cost, not raise them. Call your senators. Tell them to pass permitting reform. Ask where they stand on nuclear. Make sure that the AI companies have the path to be able to spin up new energy that they cover the cost on. Remember those chips sitting in the warehouses? They don't have to stay there. We could have the energy, but to have that energy, we have to build the facilities and the infrastructure that they need. Now, I like to believe that America's maverick spirit hasn't completely disappeared, but there could be no doubt that our belief in ourselves has diminished. We are a nation divided that is being taught to hate itself, but the choice of how we move forward is ours. AI is the most important race that will ever be won. It may be the last race that we ever run. I understand that many people wish we didn't have to run at all, but the reality is that we do. AI will be developed. There is no stopping that. At least by being out front, we can control our own destiny and work to ensure an incredible outcome for all. All right. If you want to watch me explore ideas like this live in real time, make sure you join me Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on the Tom Bilyeu Show Live, 7 a.m. Pacific time. Hope to see you there. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. 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