China’s not exactly sprinting
Chris Miller — yes, the Chip War guy — basically said the vibe in Beijing is less “AGI arms race” and more “let’s see how this shakes out.” On Tuesday’s TBPN, he argued China has been underspending on semiconductors and AI infrastructure for the last four years, even as U.S. companies keep shoveling cash into the AI gold rush.
The $295 billion plot twist
Miller was responding to reports that China is cooking up a roughly $295 billion AI investment plan. Sounds huge, right? But he pointed out that stretched over five years, it’s not exactly the kind of capital cannon blast you’ve seen from America’s biggest cloud and AI players. In his telling, Beijing just doesn’t believe AI is as existential as Washington’s tech crowd does.
Nvidia, TSMC, and the supply-chain bingo card
He also noted that Chinese firms still haven’t meaningfully bought Nvidia H200s, even after U.S. export rules loosened enough to allow sales for a stretch. Instead, Beijing is nudging companies toward Huawei’s homegrown chip stack, partly over data-security fears and the usual “foreign hardware might have a secret backdoor” paranoia.
And then there’s the physical bottleneck problem: Miller said semiconductor spending has nearly doubled as a share of GDP over the past four years, but the real limiter is still manufacturing capacity — especially at TSMC — plus advanced packaging. Translation: even when demand goes bonkers, the chips still have to come from somewhere.
Big picture: if China stays undercaffeinated on AI while the U.S. keeps binge-spending, that can keep the AI buildout narrative tilted toward American chipmakers — and keep the supply chain feeling like one giant game of “too many orders, not enough ovens.”