China | Cake, robots and electrons
Leaders are hoping it will make up for its weakness in chips
Artificial intelligence is like a cake, says Jensen Huang, the boss of Nvidia, a chipmaker. ai applications, such as chatbots, are at the top. The next layer down is software, like the large language models (llms) on which chatbots run. Then comes hardware, the semiconductors needed to train the models. This spring China’s ai firms are busy baking all of these layers. ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, has unveiled a slick new video-generation app. DeepSeek, a flashy startup, is due to release a powerful new llm. And Huawei, China’s tech champion, will unveil a new ai chip.
Though these firms keep China in the ai race with America, they are not pushing it into the lead. But there is another layer of Mr Huang’s cake that goes underneath all the others, and that is energy. Semiconductors require vast amounts of it to run the trillions of calculations behind the ai models. And China’s electrical grid has far more cheap power than the West. This disparity is known as the electron gap. Can China use it to achieve ai supremacy?
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Cake, robots and electrons”
From the March 21st 2026 edition
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