From Edison to Amazon, the US consistently invented the global future. The country suffered periodic anxieties about being overtaken, by the USSR in the 1960s, and by Japan in the 1980s. But America’s first plausible rival — the only one with the requisite scale of manufacturing, consumer markets and scientific brainpower — was China. The country began a race with Silicon Valley to impose surveillance capitalism and unbridled AI on the rest of the world.
Suddenly, this year, a chorus of American tech moguls is saying China has taken the lead. By 2030, the world might be using Chinese AI apps on Chinese devices while driving near-autonomous Chinese electric cars. If China has jumped from copying American tech to surpassing it, where does that leave Silicon Valley — and its relationship with its own country?
Last year, the Valley’s futurists entered an unstable coalition with a nostalgic politician touting fossil fuels and factory jobs. Donald Trump promised the tech moguls deregulation. But the very day they graced his inauguration, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek released AI models that seemed as good as the American competitors’, only much cheaper and more energy efficient. Then Chinese companies released the world’s fastest electric-vehicle chargers, and Huawei began selling foreigners a phone that rivalled Apple’s latest. Meanwhile, shares in Tesla, the emblematic American company of the future, tanked.