China Herald: Intel

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Monday, September 07, 2026

How governments relate to AI developments – Winston Ma

Governments are increasingly investing in sovereign funds to steer their investments into AI, copying China’s strategy, says Winston Ma, investor, attorney, author, and adjunct professor focused on the global AI economy, in The Innovator. Winston Ma wrote ten books on the digital economy, including The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.

The Innovator:

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.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Why global brands fail in China - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein

While some brands like Nike and Intel make neat profits in China, the country has become a corporate graveyard for many other global brands. Why do global brands fail in China, wonders business analyst Shaun Rein in CNBC. They should focus on China.

Shaun Rein

Best Buy and Home Depot shut their stores in 2011. Google, eBay and Amazon have been trounced by local competition. Walmart faces dwindling market share. These great firms, which dominate their home markets and are widely successful internationally failed to grab profits in China...

In China, revenue and profit per square feet of retail space is too low to justify giant stores selling low margin products. Brands need to think whether their traditional business models fit China and, if not, either skip entering the market or adjust accordingly.

The second theme that emerged was that senior executives sitting in foreign headquarters often ignore what local country heads, who are more attuned to local conditions, have to say. Or they hire the wrong country heads in the first place. One eBay executive, for example, told me that his seniors ignored the advice of local employees to run servers out of China and switched hosting to America.

“The day they switched to the US servers despite our protests, traffic dropped 50 percent because access speeds were too slow. We never recovered. It is a myth that local auction site Taobao won because they don’t charge fees. We lost because headquarters tried to implement what worked in the US, from interface design to customer service help," the executive said.

Businesses need to hire senior executives who understand how to operate under local market conditions and delegate decision-making authority to them...

China has become the must win market, so billions of dollars a year are being invested in the country. The reality is that many companies will end up failing there, or missing expectations, because they don’t localize their business models and management teams enough to compete with fast emerging domestic players.

More in CNBC

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch, or fill in our speakers' request form.

Shaun Rein is the author of the upcoming book The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that will Disrupt the World. Read more about Shaun Rein and his book at Storify.

China's rich get richer and more confident - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
Global brands must to local to win - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
The End of Cheap China is near - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)
Europe split on how to deal with China - Shaun Rein (chinaspeakersbureau.info)

Saturday, July 24, 2010

CSR program adds to competitiveness - Rupert Hoogewerf

Hurun by Fantake via Flickr

Programs for corporate social responsibility (CSR) adds to the competitive advantage of companies in China, says Hurun or Rupert Hoogewerf in his latest report. Most of the top-50 companies in his CSR list are domestic, says he says in the Shanghai Daily.Over 30 companies were domestic, the others foreign multinational companies.

The list is based on a survey of 50 leading CSR experts in China.

Bayer stood out as the company with the most respected CSR program among multinational firms, followed by HSBC and Intel.

Domestically, Vanke, Lenovo and China Mobile held the top places.

Commercial
Rupert Hoogewerf, better known as Hurun, is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting of conference, do get in touch.