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For more than two decades in the Army, part of my job was recommending which nations received American weapons, training and doctrine, and which did not. The choice rarely came down to which weapon system worked best at the range. An alliance came.
A country trained by American machines, spoke our intellectual language and built its systems around our supply chains remained tied to Washington for a generation. The one that turned to Moscow or Beijing drifted into someone else’s lane.
That lesson stayed with me. Superpowers rarely win because they possess one of the best weapons; they win because other nations choose to build their armies, economies, and, ultimately, their futures around their programs. Washington risks forgetting that lesson in today’s race to build the world’s best computer platform.
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Not just a software race
While Washington is debating which chatbot writes the sharpest story, Beijing is building something that aspires to surpass a single flagship model. That difference separates today’s technological race from tomorrow’s world system. Consider that China’s Huawei is preparing to double production of its Ascend processors by 2026, aiming for 1.6 million chips, and Chinese engineers at DeepSeek are already tuning their new models to run directly on that Huawei silicon.
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Wang Jianwei C, a professor at Peking University, tests an integrated photonic quantum chip with doctoral students Jia Xinyu L and Zhai Chonghao in a Peking University laboratory in Beijing, China, Feb. 18, 2025. (Xinhua via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, congressional hearings and cable news segments keep asking which model scores higher in the latest benchmark, an interesting question but not a decisive one.
The great wars of history were not won by the best single weapon, but by the nations that were able to generate the energy, build the industries and produce the industrial product needed to win.
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This technology is no different.
America considers this competition as a technological race. China regards it as a civilization-building task.
The mistake Washington keeps making is thinking that there is only one technological race. There is none. There are many competitions going on at the same time, each reinforcing the other.
AI Power Stack
National competition in this competition depends on what I call the AI Power Stack: the interdependent layers that together determine the power of technology. It all starts with abundant, reliable electricity. The newest data centers can draw more than a gigawatt each, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor, and China now produces more than twice as much electricity as the United States, power its central system can direct to computer clusters far more easily than our fragmented grid allows.
Above power sit semiconductors, the iron mills of the digital age. America’s effort to rebuild domestic shipbuilding is real progress.
Above the chips sits the computing infrastructure: data centers, networks and cooling that turn processors into usable power. Only when those foundations are in place do the models built on them make decisions, and models are almost all of Washington’s arguments.
Above the models sit the applications: factories, hospitals, farms and command posts where these technologies are used. And above all the layers remains the one that Washington rarely talks about: the ecosystem of engineers, companies, universities, investors and nations that decide which technologies become world-class.
The great wars of history were not won by the best single weapon, but by the nations that were able to generate the energy, build the industries and produce the industrial product needed to win.
Beijing understands the ecosystem
China is not just trying to invent the technology of the future. It strives to be a platform where the technology of the future works.
Beijing holds that layer better than Washington suggests. Instead of chasing a single successful model, Chinese firms are pricing their models aggressively, betting that acquisitions will converge over time.
By February 2026, Chinese open source models were driving weekly token traffic in the largest American model marketplace, with four out of five of the world’s most widely used systems built in China. One senior business partner speculated that many American startups are now building on basic Chinese models simply because they are cheaper to run.
Banks in Singapore, mobile carriers in Indonesia, and government platforms in Malaysia are already working on Chinese and Huawei hardware models. History suggests that technologies that reshape civilizations are rarely of great interest to engineers. They are the ones that businesses, governments and consumers have embraced, and continue to build on, for decades.
Why discovery trumps beauty
This pattern is not new. The Internet failed because it was the most secure network ever engineered. It won because millions of people built on it. Cloud computing has reshaped global commerce for the same reason. This technology will follow the same path.
That fact explains why today’s debate about open and closed models is more than a technical disagreement. Closed models emphasize safety, control and carefully controlled shipping. Open models allow universities, startups and corporations to build new applications and accelerate adoption.
The debate is not just about protecting intellectual property. It’s about deciding who the next billion users, and the nations they live in, will trust. That grand strategic competition I explored in detail in my book, “The New AI War: Freedom vs. Tyranny in the Age of Machine Empires.”
America still has the better hand
Washington is not standing still. President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, directs the Departments of Commerce and State to assemble complete packages for American exports: hardware, models, software and standards put together to meet partners and allies abroad. That is exactly the right emotion.
National competition in this competition depends on what I call the AI Power Stack: the interdependent layers that together determine the power of technology. It all starts with abundant, reliable electricity.
That strategy recognizes the essential reality of this race: America cannot export chips alone; it should bring out the entire technology ecosystem.
It treats this technology the way active security cooperation treats weapons systems: as a partnership that lasts decades, not a one-off sale.
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But this plan will only be successful if Washington supports it with the same urgency that it gives the defense budget and the semiconductor law: rapid approval of energy production and transfer, continuous investment in the production of domestic chips and the determination to compete on price, not just energy, in developing markets China is accelerating.
Bottom line
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The nation that wins the AI Cold War won’t necessarily build the smartest chatbot. It will create an ecosystem that the rest of the world chooses to trust, adopt and expand. History suggests that when those natural systems are established, they form alliances, trade, military power and political influence over generations.
At present, Beijing seems to understand that fact better than Washington. America still holds the strategic advantage, but only if it sees the actual battlefield before the decisive campaigns have already begun.
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