Gordon G. Chang
Officials from China and Russia met in Beijing this month and had "a detailed exchange of assessments" on the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes. "The meeting confirmed the closeness of the Russian and Chinese approaches," said Russia's foreign ministry.
The meeting, according to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, was "part of broader strategic coordination between Beijing and Moscow on traditional and emerging areas—from military and foreign policy to space security and critical materials."
Yes: China and Russia are ganging up on the U.S. on AI, and China in particular has a reason to do so.
The Chinese regime is trailing in the AI-powered Fourth Industrial Revolution and needs help. "On their own, it's unlikely that either China or Russia can best America in the race for artificial intelligence," technology analyst Brandon Weichert told me. "Together, however, they can."
"Thus, China is increasingly looking to Russia for assistance in competing with—and defeating—the Americans in the Great Tech War," Weichert, also author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life, says. "Already Chinese and Russian firms are cooperating more than they have in decades. They are exploring joint ventures, especially in AI."
Many analysts expect the future of AI to be Chinese. Beijing, wrote Amy Webb in Inc. in 2018, has been "building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future." "China," she says, "is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business."
Webb is not the only China booster. "China's advantages in size, data collection, and national determination have allowed it, over the past decade, to close the gap with American leaders of this industry," wrote Graham Allison of Harvard's Kennedy School in December 2019. "It is currently on a trajectory to overtake the United States in the decade ahead."
So far, the promise of China has yet to be realized. "The biggest obstacle facing China's quest for AI dominance is the availability of the world's most sophisticated computer chips," Weichert notes. Simply stated, despite great effort, China still cannot make them.
Beijing has stumbled in building a semiconductor industry despite pouring tens of billions of dollars into the effort in recent years. Semiconductors, for instance, are part of the infamous Made in China 2025 initiative, a decade-long program to achieve self-sufficiency in crucial sectors.
China cannot manufacture state-of-the-art 3-nanometer chips, which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has been making. TSMC, as the company is known, is the world's leader, producing some 92 percent of the world's sophisticated chips.
So how advanced are China's manufacturers? The country's fabs can manufacture 7-nm chips, which were found inside Huawei's Mate 60 Pro smartphone offered for sale last August. The chip is manufactured by China's SMIC, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.
People watch a robotic dog at the Apsara Conference, a cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) conference, in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province on November 3, 2022.
China had touted a breakthrough by mass producing 5-nm chips for a new laptop from Huawei Technologies, the Qingyun L540. But as a Bloomberg News teardown ultimately revealed in January, the laptop's chip was in fact made by Taiwan's TSMC in 2020, not by China's SMIC.
In December, Shanghai-based NIO unveiled a self-driving chip, the Shenji NX9031. The EV maker will be the first Chinese car company to use a 5-nm chip.
SMIC believes it will be able to make 5-nm chips as early as this year. If it does so, it will be with equipment from AMSL, the Dutch company with a near-monopoly on the sale of extreme ultraviolet lithography systems. The Netherlands, under pressure from the Biden administration, revoked export licenses for sales of AMSL's most advanced chip-making machines to China.
The revocations were late. There was a surge in Chinese purchasers of such machines: China's imports of lithography systems from the Netherlands increased 1,050 percent in November from the same month in 2022.
China has also evaded America's semiconductor restrictions by smuggling chips in live lobsters and prosthetic baby bumps, among other things. Many argue, one way or another, China will be able to obtain chips and chip-making equipment, so Washington's export bans are useless.
No, they're not. They're effective because they materially slow China's progress in the race of the century. At the moment, American prohibitions on exports of chips and chip-making equipment are leaky, but they will be tightened because, as the Wall Street Journal told us in December, "The Chip Wars Are Metastasizing."
"Semiconductors are in everything with an 'On' and 'Off' switch," Keith Krach, a former under secretary of state and the chairman of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue, told me. "The U.S. and the free world cannot cede this critical industry to China's Communist Party, our foremost global adversary."
At the moment, U.S. companies have powered China's advances in both semiconductors and artificial intelligence with $3 billion, as the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party reported this month. That flow of capital will probably end soon.
Why?
Americans are beginning to understand what's at stake. "China's overtaking America on AI could fundamentally alter the global balance of power against the United States," Weichert states.
And as director of White House Science and Technology Policy Arati Prabhakar told the Financial Times, "In the United States, we understand that we're in a moment where American leadership in the world depends on American leadership in AI."
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