China is also responsible for one-third of renewable energy capacity, over 60% of 5G base stations, and 70% of High-Speed Rail track while it has already achieved the world’s first drone civil passenger licence (in addition to accounting for at least 70% of overall global drone production and up to 90% in consumer drones) and produces 60% of global electric cars.
Lost in the geopolitical mess of the Trade War was that Nvidia, with a Taiwanese-descending CEO nonetheless, was being quietly positioned as the face of the global AI revolution with a staggering near-monopoly of 90% of the global AI chip revolution. And yet now Huawei, already having already achieved 5nm AI chip width with 3nm also in development, has come back from the commercial dead and survived US sanctions to challenge Nvidia’s dominant global stranglehold with a cheaper product harnessed by superior AI.
Meanwhile ChatGPT, an extremely limited form of AI that would barely qualify for Perception AI and in effect a glorified Internet AI chatbot that is comparable to primitive late 1990s internet search engines at the start of the Dotcom Bubble, was being hailed as pioneering ground-breaking radical AI (equivalent on the stock market highs to US investors acting like there are now autonomous flying cars and widespread humanoid robots serving human beings akin to Blade Runner) when ironically at the same time China is ready to commercialise fully autonomous drone and vehicle transport for human beings and has palm-scanning recognition payment technology.
In summary what America has innovated so far is a sophisticated chatbot and a semiconductor chip; neither of which is globally pioneering or even the best in its respective field and hardly the stuff of science fiction in AI’s potential. In China generative AI is not even considered ground-breaking.
PWC estimated that while the US would ride the AI wave first until 2025, by 2030 China would have accrued double the global GDP share of AI by $7 trillion to the US’ $3.5 trillion. American AI has peaked and the Great Storm is coming in 2025 for the Magnificent Seven.
All the while the Chinese have carefully been biding their time at rock-bottom, keeping their AI chip self-sufficiency development going and the Belt and Road alive with high-speed rail now a reality in Indonesia and the world’s most advanced city being constructed outside Cairo for example, and ready to break into its own bull-market off the back of its own Fourth Industrial Revolution.
In terms of current similar stock market return potential to investing in Nvidia in 2015, major Chinese companies such as Taoping (smart cities), Ucommune (smart cities), Borqs (5G), SOS (Blockchain/AI), Luokung (Smart Cities),and Jiuzi (electric vehicles) for example are all around $1 on the US stock markets with 1,000% return potential back to all-time highs (within the last five years) of over $1,000,000 from a $1,000 investment.
Blue Hat (Virtual/Augmented Reality), Datasea (Smart Cities), OneConnect Financial Technology (Smart Cities/Blockchain), and Mingzhu Logistics Holdings (Electric Vehicles), also around $1 in stock prices, offer 100% and over $100,000 all-time high return potential from the same investment.
During the Western Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 China grew at 10% annual rates and the great de-coupling on the global stock markets is about to take quite a contrasting reversal as the Chinese dramatically close-in on American GDP having finally escaped the Covid quicksand.
This is the real Cold War where the US faces a Chinese adversary masquerading a Western Marxist ideology from capitalism’s inside, that is hesitant to wage global ‘hot’ wars, has a population the size of India across a land size of America with the innovative ability of the Japanese, and an economy not 10% the size of the US’ at its very peak like the Soviet Union was but already 80% with a 2050 projection of $15 trillion larger and greater than any lead enjoyed by America in history.
The Chinese Cold War is going to be built on Fourth Industrial Revolution technology not democracy v communism and Xinjiang is already the frontline for the Digital Silk Road in AI and Renewable Energy export and innovation. Covid acted as the New Iron Curtain to divide the world to allow China and America to develop their AI capabilities in isolation from each other.
China was the leader of the ancient world as the centre of the Old Silk Road, the ancient ancestor of capitalism with countless inventions dating back to 8,000 BCE such as paper, the compass, gunpowder, and block-printing, and with its own ‘manifest destiny’ to run the world quite literally in ancient history’s and Chinese DNA.
The Chinese, as well as the developing countries of the Belt and Road, also have the collective trauma of Western colonialism that can only be truly exorcised by regaining power.
This is the ultimate clash of the civilisations where the ancient world (China) meets the modern world (the West) in a cultural showdown for the ages that will define and evolve technological innovation.