Chip sanctions were supposed to stop China. They accelerated it. 80% of humanoid robots. 63% of HuggingFace fine-tunes. $0.35-per-mile robotaxis. The race has a leader. It’s not the US.
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TL;DR
- ~$589 billion erased in a single day: NVIDIA’s loss following DeepSeek (January 27, 2025), an all-time record for any company. Source
- GLM-5 beats Claude Opus on the world’s hardest benchmark (50.4% vs 43.4%), trained on zero NVIDIA chips. Source
- More than 80% of the global humanoid robot market is Chinese. The Unitree G1 starts at $13,500; the Boston Dynamics Atlas runs approximately $420,000 (estimated; no official price published). Source
- $0.35 vs ~$4 per mile: the cost of an Apollo Go robotaxi in Wuhan versus Waymo in San Francisco. Source
- 63% of fine-tunes on HuggingFace are built on Chinese models. Qwen has surpassed Llama as the most downloaded model family. Source
- The overall gap has narrowed to 3–6 months, according to Demis Hassabis (Davos 2026) and Recorded Future. Two years ago, the consensus was “several years.”