China is accelerating its push to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, not by mirroring Silicon Valley but by leveraging its unique economic and political landscape. On March 25, Beijing-based AI startup DeepSeek released a major upgrade to its large language model, DeepSeek-V3-0324, through Hugging Face, showcasing significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities (Reuters, 2025). Accessing DeepSeek models via API is reportedly 13 times cheaper than OpenAI’s — a signal of China’s emphasis on scalable, affordable AI.

Yet, as Jacob Dreyer recently highlighted in Nature, China’s AI ambitions are about more than just matching U.S. benchmarks. Rather than chasing viral chatbot applications, Chinese firms focus on industrial and infrastructural challenges. Zhipu AI and Alibaba-backed 01.AI are working with state entities to automate financial tasks and optimize manufacturing. This reflects China’s AI priorities: not venture capital, but public service and industrial modernization. China is also preparing for AI’s infrastructure demands. The National Integrated Computing Power Network, launched in 2021, aims to build expansive data centers in western China, where land and power are more affordable — a response to the rising energy needs of AI systems.