Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, worked both in China and the US on AI. In a discussion with Nathan B. Jones, his main argument is that both countries are not in an AI race, and the largest misconception is this wrong idea an arms race is developing. Nobody has won the electricity race; the same goes for AI, he argues.
Q:Do you consider it to be a logical next step for governments to create AI sovereign wealth funds given that sovereign funds are already the largest investors in AI?
WM: Exactly. The U.S. sovereign fund (and its Intel investment, among others) is a new phenomenon, but my Hunt for Unicorns book, which was published in 2020, was already talking about how sovereign funds globally — from the Middle East, China, Korea, Singapore, and Southeast Asia — were investing in tech, including AI.
Today government sovereign funds are the biggest investors in AI. Look at Anthropic: it’s the most valuable AI startup (and its CEO said the total addressable market exceeds $30 trillion). Most recently, the two largest rounds were led by Singapore GIC, the Singapore Government Investment Corporation.
The same is true for data centers. There’s a digital infrastructure investment consortium with the potential to invest $100 billion known as the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), co-led by BlackRock, the world’s largest alternative assets manager, and its subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), as well as a few major sovereign wealth funds, including Singapore’s Temasek, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and Kuwait’s KIA.
When it comes to public AI stock trading, Norway’s sovereign investment fund is one of the largest public market investors in Nvidia, which dominates the AI chip layer, and it has huge voting power in many AI and tech companies because of its public holdings. These are 100% state-owned investment vehicles investing into the full AI stack.
The year 2026 is the start of a new phase: since public investment funds like those listed above are already financing the entire AI stack, formally establishing AI’s own sovereign wealth funds — such that AI gains can be shared as public benefits — is the natural institutional evolution.
Q: There is a very good reason for governments to invest. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change noted in a recent report that compute is not just a source of scientific and economic progress, but the new benchmark of global power economically and geopolitically.
WM: It’s not the compute alone; it’s the overall AI stack.
Q: This is why the whole issue of sovereignty has become so important in Europe because it doesn’t control the full stack.
WM: That is precisely the point. True AI sovereignty requires alignment across all five layers: securing energy baseload, manufacturing silicon, building data centers, hosting proprietary or open-weight models, and deploying productivity applications.
China has focused heavily on using sovereign vehicles to capitalize this stack. In addition to the well-known CIC sovereign wealth fund, where I worked as a financial investor managing a global market portfolio, China also established the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (“Big Fund”). Its $47.5 billion Phase III, launched in late 2024, directly targets advanced semiconductors, yielding major market listings like ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) — China’s domestic answer to both U.S.-based Micron and South Korea’s Samsung.
In January 2025, Big Fund III co-founded the $8.2 billion National AI Fund. When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek raised its external financing round, the National AI Fund contributed a ¥1 billion check. Although smaller than the non-voting capital injected by commercial giants like Tencent and CATL, the state fund took the only position with direct governance voting rights.
Q: So when the U.S. government takes a 10% share in Intel, they’re essentially copying China?
WM: Exactly. Trump is taking a page out of China’s sovereign AI playbook — that’s the title of my Financial Times op-ed in June.
AI innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin explains why the AI fight between China and the US is wrongly seen as a zero-sum game. The struggle is wrongly perceived as a race to a finish line, but that line does not exist, he tells at Moonshots.
AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin explains how China’s open-source strategy developed, not as a big plan by the communist party, but because they were forced by US policies, he says on Facebook.
Easy return policies have been a key in e-commerce, but AI is offering China’s consumers an easy way to commit fraud, writes consumer expert Ashley Dudarenok on her weblog. A buyer purchases a product, photographs it in good condition, and feeds the image into an AI tool with a simple instruction: “Add mold spots to this fruit” or “Create a tear in this clothing item,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Return fraud is not a new phenomenon. But the accessibility of generative AI has transformed it from a manual, high-effort activity into a scalable threat. Previously, fake damage photos required basic photo-editing skills. Today, anyone with a smartphone can generate convincing fake photos of damaged goods in under 20 seconds.
The mechanism is straightforward. A buyer purchases a product, photographs it in good condition, and feeds the image into an AI tool with a simple instruction: “Add mold spots to this fruit” or “Create a tear in this clothing item.”
The AI generates a modified image that appears to show a defective product. The buyer then submits this AI-generated evidence as part of a refund-only claim, keeping both the product and the refund.
This form of refund abuse has proliferated across categories from fresh produce to apparel to electronics. The scale is concerning. On social platforms, tutorials openly advertise “refund-only tricks” for a fee of 288 yuan, with claims that a single account can successfully execute approximately 30 refunds. Some operators even offer “代退” services, charging 170 yuan to forge medical certificates or damage evidence.
AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin discusses the AI race between China and the US with James M. Lindsay at the Council of Foreign Relations. He explains why the current priorities for winning that race are fundamentally wrong.
Turning AI into a paid platform is a key criterion for China’s success, writes marketing expert Ashley Dudarenokon her weblog, as video AI has become a major commercial success in setting up paid platforms. “Chinese video AI has become one of China’s clearest tests for artificial intelligence commercialization. The category is being judged by paid usage, creator demand, and platform placement,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Chinese video AI has become one of China’s clearest tests for artificial intelligence commercialization. The category is being judged by paid usage, creator demand, and platform placement.
China has a rare advantage here. Video tools can enter short video feeds, ecommerce stores, ad accounts, and creator studios at the same time. This embedded distribution gives Chinese video AI a faster route from model release to business use…
Chinese video AI now has commercial numbers that most generative video categories still lack. Kling AI crossed USD20 million in monthly revenue in December 2025. That translated into USD240 million in Annualized Revenue Run Rate (ARR).
Annualized Revenue Run Rate means the yearly revenue implied by one month of recurring revenue. Kuaishou said Kling had reached USD100 million ARR in March 2025, ten months after launch.
These figures put commercial viability at the center of the story. The useful test is whether users keep paying after the launch excitement fades. Kling’s curve suggests that professional creators, merchants, and commercial teams are paying for repeat output.
China’s wider AI base gives this category more room to mature. The State Council said China’s core AI industry exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan (USD176.4 billion) in 2025, with more than 6,200 AI companies. A separate State Council summary put China’s internet user base at 1.125 billion and generative AI adoption at 42.8 percent by the end of 2025.
Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenokcompares at her weblog Chozan two AI models your company can pick from in 2026. “DeepSeek vs Claude is not a comparison of two AI tools. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of deploying intelligence inside an organization,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
DeepSeek vs Claude is not a comparison of two AI tools. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of deploying intelligence inside an organization.
In 2026, the critical question is no longer which model performs better. It is how AI is integrated, scaled, and governed across real systems. DeepSeek and Claude represent opposite answers to that question.
McKinsey reports that 88% of companies now use AI in at least one business function, but only about one-third have actually scaled it across the organization. That gap—between using AI and scaling it—is exactly where the difference between DeepSeek and Anthropic shows up.
DeepSeek treats AI as a cost-efficient, flexible infrastructure layer that companies can shape and deploy internally. Claude treats AI as a controlled, enterprise-ready system designed for reliability and structured execution.
This distinction matters because companies are no longer experimenting with AI. They are deciding how deeply it should be embedded into operations, and that decision requires choosing an architecture, not just a model.
Practical visionair and ChinaBriefs author Bjorn Ognibeni speaks at the E-commerce expo 2026 in Berlin about what Western e-commerce companies can learn from China. While Silicon Valley perfects Agentic AI demos, Chinese platforms are already deploying AI at scale – and making money doing it, he tells his audience
The exit bans send a message—that any AI company founded in China, with business operations still in the country, are likewise reachable by Beijing, Ke Yan, head of Singapore’s DZT Research, told Newsweek.
Beijing’s regulators then treat the deal as a technology export, arguing that the team, model weights, and training data were developed in China, regardless of where the company is legally based.
“Once they were physically in China, Singapore’s corporate domicile became irrelevant,” he said.
Beijing is most concerned on whether strategically sensitive technologies developed in China—and the talent and data behind them—continue to be transferred offshore through corporate restructuring in Singapore, Winston Ma, New York University law school adjunct professor and the author of The Digital War, told Newsweek.
The Chinese authorities have made clear this “Singapore washing” will not automatically insulate any deal from government oversight, Ma stated.
“The real challenge is defining what counts as ‘strategic’ in a fast-moving AI landscape—much like how TikTok’s seemingly goofy videos initially appeared far removed from national security concerns—until their underlying data and algorithmic power came into sharper focus.”
China’s financial authorities shocked the financial world by blocking a 2 billion dollar deal by Meta to purchase AI startup Manus. Financial expert Winston Ma, adjunct professor of law at New York University, explains at CNBC how unwinding a done deal might be a landmark decision for China, but in no way exceptional, as the US has a longstanding practice of cancelling deals for national security reasons.
Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok dives into Doubao AI, one of the main contenders in China’s AI race for ChoZan. “ByteDance integrates the assistant into its social, cloud, and hardware ecosystems,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Doubao AI has become a central figure in China’s generative AI race. Developed by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin, it was launched in August 2023 and quickly rose to prominence. By early 2026, it had over 155 million weekly active users, more than any other AI chatbot in China.
During the Lunar New Year holiday in February 2026, the app’s daily active users surpassed 100 million. This surge was driven by a partnership with the Spring Festival Gala, during which the assistant handled 1.9 billion queries in a single evening. These numbers place Doubao AI among the world’s largest generative AI platforms.
Many international observers still ask what Doubao is and what its meaning is in the AI ecosystem. In simple terms, Doubao AI is ByteDance’s generative AI assistant and model platform designed to power chat, automation, and multimodal applications across consumer and enterprise environments.
To understand why it is so influential, one must look beyond the simple idea of a chatbot and consider how ByteDance operates within the ecosystem of Chinese social media platforms, where content, discovery, and digital services intersect.
ByteDance integrates the assistant into its social, cloud, and hardware ecosystems. This article explores what Doubao AI is, how its technology works, its capabilities, how it compares with global peers, and how businesses can evaluate its relevance in 2026.
AI was a keyword in China’s 15th five-year plan, running from 2026 to 2030. “These are kind of concrete examples that big tech companies are taking actions to try to engage everyday people with advanced AI,” said Winston Ma, author of “The Digital War” and adjunct professor in the global AI-digital economy at Bastille Post.
The Bastille Post:
Signs of the AI push are already visible in the private sector. During the country’s recent Spring Festival holiday which marked celebrations for the Chinese New Year, major companies distributed traditional red packets — or lucky money coupons — through AI-driven apps, a consumer-level case study of how policy is meeting practice.
“These are kind of concrete examples that big tech companies are taking actions to try to engage everyday people with advanced AI,” said Winston Ma, author of “The Digital War” and adjunct professor in the global AI-digital economy.
Ma believes that wider adoption of AI among consumers will also generate vast amounts of data, fueling improvements in AI products and services.
“You have more than a billion internet users that are integrated by the same language, same culture, and the same mobile payment. So, every day there is tremendous amount of data accumulated at the digital platforms. So, the next step is to better utilize the data, organize the data, and put the data into work by AI to generate value,” he said.
That value is increasingly visible in intelligent products, most notably robots. At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas back in January, Chinese firms dominated the exhibition floor with machines and high-tech robots of every shape and size, performing not only acrobatic displays but also practical tasks that underscored their commercial potential…
“There will be a huge range of embodied AI. But overall, China has the advantage of the manufacturing process developed here in the “Made in China” expansion the last three decades. Essentially, Chinese manufacturing power can be combined with Chinese open source models to develop a huge industry, relating to industry robots as well as humanoids,” Ma said.
Ma noted that this year’s “two sessions” could extend the technology agenda “Beyond AI,” encompassing quantum computing and biomedicine to lay the groundwork for next-generation industries.
Chinese chipmaker Montage Technology soared 64% on its Hong Kong IPO debut. Financial analyst Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and former head of North America for CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, explains how US efforts to curtail Chinese semiconductor and AI firms helped them in the current boost, he tells Bloomberg. “The strong lineup of global cornerstone buyers suggests that Chinese AI-related IPOs are attracting institutional investors back to the HKEX market again,” he says.
Bloomberg:
Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and former head of North America for CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, said US sanctions limiting China’s access to advanced chips such as Nvidia’s were accelerating capital and policy support for China’s domestic semiconductor value chain, including “middleware” chip designers such as Montage.
“The strong lineup of global cornerstone buyers suggests that Chinese AI-related IPOs are attracting institutional investors back to the HKEX market again,” he said, referring to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
“Montage’s Hong Kong debut underscores how China’s AI chip ecosystem is moving ‘up the stack’ from basic components towards specialised chips that connect processors and memory inside data centres,” he added.
Montage’s listing also comes as Hong Kong logged its strongest start to a year since 2021, with IPOs and second listings raising about US$5.5 billion in January, the most since US$7.6 billion was raised in January 2021, LSEG data showed.
Leading AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin, on the road to the World Economic Forum in Davos, discusses how China will be one of the AI dark horses to watch in 2026, as he tells at the Big Bang Tech Report. He points at Minimax, Moonshot, and Z.AI, and also on the hardware side, Huawei, he adds.
For years, the growth of AI was built on scaling up its GPUs, but innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, sees now a move to more collaboration. Chip maker Nvidia is not the only winner anymore, as competition is growing and AI models can develop through more experience and need less capacity to grow, as China’s Deepseek proved earlier this year, he says at the Big Bang Future Lab.
