Sunday, January 26th 2025
The Empire Strikes Back: China Prepares One Trillion Yuan AI Plan to Rival $500 Billion US Stargate Project
A few days ago, we reported on the US reading a massive 500 billion US Dollar package called "Stargate Project" to build AI infrastructure on American soil. However, China is also planning to stay close behind, or even overlap the US in some areas, with a one trillion Yuan "AI Industry Development Action Plan". Translating into around 138 billion US Dollars at the time of writing, the Chinese AI plan is similar to the US Stargate project: develop AI infrastructure through data center expansion and AI accelerator scale-up. Unlike the Stargate project, led by private initiatives and OpenAI at the helm, the Chinese AI Industry Development Action Plan is an entirely state-sponsored initiative that will fund firms like Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba, and DeepSeek with additional AI accelerators (or sanction-abiding GPUs) to create more advanced AI systems.
Over the past few days, DeepSeek, a branch of a Chinese hedge fund, has not only open-sourced its R1 reasoning model but made it entirely free to use for everyone. This has challenged moat of Western competitors like OpenAI, pushing its CEO Sam Altman to offer an O3-mini reasoning model for up to 100 queries per day for the ChatGPT Plus user tier. Not only did DeepSeek provide a model equally intelligent to OpenAI's best, but it also offered it completely free. This has stirred up the tech community quite a bit and showed that Chinese companies are not much behind Western competitors. With this AI action plan, the Chinese government wants to push its domestic AI makers even further ahead and allow them to overtake cutting-edge model development potentially. Of course, getting GPUs for these projects remains an intricate task, but with export control loopholes and domestic AI accelerator development, the AI arms race is picking up quite a bit.
Source:
Ray Wang on X
Over the past few days, DeepSeek, a branch of a Chinese hedge fund, has not only open-sourced its R1 reasoning model but made it entirely free to use for everyone. This has challenged moat of Western competitors like OpenAI, pushing its CEO Sam Altman to offer an O3-mini reasoning model for up to 100 queries per day for the ChatGPT Plus user tier. Not only did DeepSeek provide a model equally intelligent to OpenAI's best, but it also offered it completely free. This has stirred up the tech community quite a bit and showed that Chinese companies are not much behind Western competitors. With this AI action plan, the Chinese government wants to push its domestic AI makers even further ahead and allow them to overtake cutting-edge model development potentially. Of course, getting GPUs for these projects remains an intricate task, but with export control loopholes and domestic AI accelerator development, the AI arms race is picking up quite a bit.
66 Comments on The Empire Strikes Back: China Prepares One Trillion Yuan AI Plan to Rival $500 Billion US Stargate Project
Meanwhile… Nvidia over here selling shovels. Why put any effort into raster when you can hit an enormous fad market, then feed the leftovers to another market?
Every stupid step the US takes against China, they have an answer for and the Chinese thumb their noses.
The best part is, they open source/IP share pretty much Everything - so their entire Industry sector advances at light speed, and the US spends vast sums on lawyers and propaganda bogging themselves down to individually profit off whatever slight advantage (with the exception being NVIDIA) while they think they can.
Americans panicking over China overtaking them in soooo many ways is delicious to watch, because godknows it's time yall learned some perspective and humility.
And at the end? Next to no one will be able to afford their products because they'll have crushed almost all employment with systems that should in their best case scenario reduce workload requirements and create a society without the need for work-for-money scenarios. Instead, it's all leading to large numbers of people without jobs, all replaced by AI and robotics, to create products no one will buy because they can't afford them.
And what will the news report? How lazy these people who can't find jobs are. Then various sources will find ever larger marginalized groups to blame for the job shortages rather than realize it was the AI we were ill prepared to welcome all along. That's assuming AI actually delivered even a tenth of what its proponents promise. If it doesn't deliver, it's so much wasted money and power and infrastructure that could have been focused on improving actual citizen's lives instead.
In the end, will it amount to anything? No.
As with like majority of these, the end result will be: project results not what was outlined, timeliness extended to indefinitely, cost overruns, people pocketing, etc.
Always the case. Companies will just stake claim to get a bit part of that pie and not deliver.
If you do not like the US, than that is your right. You'll not receive such grace from China.
The other thing is, I always wanted to own one of the Mate phones when they were competing at the top end but Huawei were obviously sanctioned later and that never happened. The other day I was looking at their financials after ages and they still seem to be doing pretty good. I thought they'd have a tougher time with no android access but I guess they've sort of succeeded in doing that in their home market at least. The new camera setup seems interesting too but no point in owning one here without android I suppose.
But yeah, complex times. I hope they all come to decisions that benefit everyone as a whole. Even 1/10 would be a good start.
www.inc.com/kit-eaton/trump-ai-order-raises-questions-about-its-goals-and-safety-focus/91131951
mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in
A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk.
www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-tech-oligarchy-has-been-here
Putin's Tucker Carlson interview springs to mind...And Sam Altman quoting Napoleon, come to think of it...
So pathetic..