Chinese AI developers say they can’t beat America without better chips

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SINGAPORE—After a year of gung-ho news about China’s gains in artificial intelligence, some elite Chinese AI researchers are coming to a more pessimistic conclusion. The country’s chances of catching up to the U.S.

are slim in the short run, they say, because of a bottleneck in chips. “The truth may be that the gap is actually widening," Tang Jie, founder of Chinese AI startup Zhipu, said at a conference last weekend in Beijing. “While we’re doing well in certain areas, we must still acknowledge the challenges and the disparities we face." One illustration: When AI chip leader Nvidia introduced its next-generation Rubin hardware in January, it named a number of American companies as customers, but no Chinese AI developer was named because U.S.

rules block direct sales to China. Chinese companies have started discussions about renting computing power at data centers in Southeast Asia and the Middle East to get access to Rubin chips, according to people involved in the talks. That follows companies’ efforts last year to access chips in Nvidia’s Blackwell series.

Deals by Chinese companies to use Nvidia chips in third countries are generally viewed as legal. But they require circuitous arrangements and typically leave Chinese AI developers with fewer chips and more inconvenience compared with well-funded American competitors. Justin Lin, who heads development of Alibaba’s AI model Qwen, was asked at the Beijing conference about the chance of any Chinese company leapfrogging the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic over the next three to five years.