[The competition between China and the US in artificial intelligence (AI) has entered an era of national confrontation. Who is really being amazing? Who will spill blood everywhere?｜2063]

On November 24, local time, U.S. President Trump signed an executive order to launch a new national program aimed at transforming scientific research methods and accelerating scientific discoveries using artificial intelligence (AI): the "Genesis Program." This should also be an extension of the $500 billion "Stargate" nationwide AI data center construction plan announced by the Trump administration earlier this year.

Trump's executive order directs the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to create an artificial intelligence experimental platform that integrates U.S. supercomputers and unique data assets to generate scientifically-based models and support robotic laboratories.

Coordinated by the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST), the national program integrates data and infrastructure from various federal government departments. The federal government will collaborate with innovators from academia and the private sector to support and enhance the "Genesis Program," creating a platform for science and security in the United States, and vows to establish a closed-loop research system for artificial intelligence within nine months.

This plan is now officially compared by the White House to the "Manhattan Project" for nuclear weapons development and the "Apollo Program" for manned moon landing, marking the United States' beginning to bet on artificial intelligence with a national system, attempting to use AI as a lever to re-ignite innovation across the entire American technology, energy, industry, and military systems.

The Trump administration believes that the challenges currently facing the United States require a historic national-level action, with the core goal of winning the global technological competition in artificial intelligence—of course, the most important competitor is China.

The executive order claims that the American Science and Security Platform being established is not just a software system, but also a digital infrastructure for the future of American scientific research. Therefore, it will integrate:

🔻The world's largest federal scientific dataset: accumulated from decades of investment by the U.S. government.

🔻Supercomputing Resources: Including the supercomputers and cloud AI computing power of the Department of Energy's national laboratories.

🔻AI Agents: Used for automating research workflows, generating new hypotheses, and validating experimental results.

🔻Robotics Lab: Robotics/Automation Lab + Production Tools, supporting AI-led experimentation and manufacturing.

To this end, the DOE (U.S. Department of Energy) also needs to propose at least 20 "national challenges" within 60 days and has identified the first six priority areas to tackle, namely:

🔻Advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, semiconductors and microelectronics.

The ambitious "Genesis Plan" of the Trump administration aims not only to win the artificial intelligence race against China but also to reshape the global technological order to ensure that the U.S. maintains absolute dominance over artificial intelligence technology for the next 30 years—note that Americans speak of "absolute dominance"; there is no second language system for hegemony. The U.S. will inevitably perish in this language system in the future.

That is to say, the U.S. government now realizes that if it loses its absolute dominance in the AI field in the future, it will lose completely. However, to put it another way, all the promises, no matter how perfectly they are described, will ultimately turn into amazing if they cannot be fulfilled.

However, it can also be said that through this new plan, after the China-US competition has entered the "systemic confrontation" stage, artificial intelligence will no longer be a technological toy for Silicon Valley moguls, but has already become a national strategic resource for the United States. The US government realizes that relying solely on corporate giants can no longer win the technological war against China; it must mobilize the national apparatus. Of course, whether today's US national apparatus can still function as effectively as it did during the "Manhattan Project" and the "Apollo Program" is another matter.

The Trump administration has used state machinery to establish the "Genesis Plan"; can the war on artificial intelligence really be won? This is actually a straightforward question. Whether the Trump administration can continue to secure the 2028 presidential election, or even whether the Republican Party can maintain its parliamentary advantage in the upcoming midterm elections, remains uncertain at this point.

Just like the previous Biden administration established the "CHIPS and Science Act," which essentially delayed and harmed China's technological innovation, that act was only in effect for two years and ended with Trump's re-election and the shift to launching a "reciprocal tariff" war against China. Now, who would endorse that act?

Regarding the future competition between China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence, I would like to start by quoting a recent speech by Alibaba Chairman Daniel Zhang at the University of Hong Kong from a different perspective. This was the annual event of the HKU Business School, and Daniel Zhang opened with a counterintuitive viewpoint: the competition rules for artificial intelligence defined by Americans are wrong!

How do Americans calculate the win or loss of artificial intelligence? They just look at whose large language model is more powerful.

But Cai Chongxin believes that this scoring method itself is problematic, because the real winner is not the one with the best model, but the one who uses it the best. The underlying logic of his judgment is that the value of AI lies in its penetration rate. The Chinese government's artificial intelligence plan is very pragmatic, aiming for a penetration rate of 90% for AI agents and devices by 2030.

Why is the adoption of artificial intelligence in China faster? This is not something that can be replaced by a curse or a vow. Cai Chongxin also listed a complete checklist, which is particularly worth keeping:

🔻The first is the advantage of electric power resources: China's electricity costs are 40% lower than those in the United States. 15 years ago, China began large-scale investments in power transmission infrastructure, with the State Grid's annual capital expenditure reaching $90 billion, while the United States only spent $30 billion. As a result, China's installed power capacity is now 2.6 times that of the United States, and the newly added capacity is 9 times that of the United States.

🔻The second is the crushing cost of data centers: building a data center in China costs 60% less than in the United States, and this does not even account for chips, just the infrastructure.

🔻The third point is that China has an absolute engineer dividend: nearly half of the AI scientists and researchers worldwide have degrees from Chinese universities—whether they currently work at American companies, Chinese companies, or anywhere else in the world. Recently, some Americans have complained that in the AI team at Meta (Facebook), their colleagues are communicating in Chinese, and he completely cannot understand.

🔻The fourth is the system-level innovation forced by China's resource scarcity: the US has a large number of GPUs while China does not, but scarcity has created an advantage instead. Training a trillion-parameter model can lead to terrifying GPU consumption if system efficiency is not high. Chinese teams, due to hardware limitations, must optimize the system to the extreme, and DeepSeek was forced out in this way.

🔻Another point is that open-source will definitely win: this is also the core judgment of Cai Chongxin's speech. Open-source models will defeat closed-source models not because they are more advanced, but because they better align with the interests of the majority of users worldwide.

In addition to this speech by Cai Chongxin, in observing the future competition between China and the U.S. in artificial intelligence, I would like to recommend another piece of information: the British "Financial Times" reports that China's scientific research capabilities are now equipped to compete with, and even possibly surpass, the U.S. and Europe. This is because the current focus of innovation in the U.S. is on future technologies like the "moon landing project" of general artificial intelligence, while China's R&D is primarily aimed at addressing the shortcomings in the real economy, which is the technological self-reliance and self-strengthening promoted by the Chinese government.

With the joint efforts of the government, enterprises, and academia over the years, China is expected to lead the future global supply chains for energy and transportation through technological breakthroughs in fundamental fields. Since 2015, the overall R&D expenditure invested by the Chinese government has surpassed that of the United States. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the R&D investment by Chinese enterprises has also been rapidly increasing over the past decade, with the number of R&D institutions growing nearly threefold to 150,000, and the number of R&D personnel in enterprises nearly doubling to 5 million.

This reminds me of what Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said during a speech in Taiwan last month. He mentioned that there are only about 20,000 engineers working on AI research in Silicon Valley, while in China, that number has reached 1 million—clearly demonstrating that Huang's statement holds true.

Moreover, on October 29, the special fund for the development of strategic emerging industries initiated by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council of China and entrusted to China National New Investment Company Limited for establishment and management was officially launched, helping to accelerate the development of strategic emerging industries. The first phase of the fund has a scale of 51 billion yuan, of which China National New plans to contribute about 15 billion yuan.

The fund will support state-owned central enterprises in addressing industrial shortcomings and weaknesses, laying out frontier innovations, and further enhancing core functions and improving core competitiveness.

🔻First is the investment strategy for emerging industries, namely artificial intelligence, aerospace, high-end equipment, quantum technology, and other directions.

🔻Secondly, it is about investing in the layout of future industries, namely future energy, future information, future manufacturing, and so on.

🔻The function of this central enterprise's new fund is to address the shortcomings of the central enterprise's industry, accelerate the industrialization of technological achievements, and build an ecosystem of "technology innovation + capital operation + industry empowerment."

In early November, China Unicom Group was one of the first to announce that it would invest 1.5 billion yuan of its own funds to subscribe to the strategic new fund of the central enterprise, and after the investment, its shareholding ratio would be 2.94%.

Apart from China Unicom, China Telecom has also announced an investment of 1.5 billion yuan, with a shareholding ratio of 2.94%, while China Mobile has invested 6 billion yuan to occupy an 11.76% share, ranking as the third largest shareholder after China Reform Holdings and Beijing Financial Street Capital Operation Group.

Another big suspense is how large the total scale of this central enterprise strategic new fund will be? Will it be competitive? Currently, domestic media only revealed that its first phase scale is 51 billion RMB, but according to the Financial Times in the UK, the total scale of this central enterprise new fund initiated by China may reach 72 billion USD, which means it will exceed 500 billion RMB.

However, I would like to remind you again that the Trump administration calls this "Genesis Plan" another "Manhattan Project" or "Apollo Program." The United States did indeed develop nuclear weapons, and the "Manhattan Project" is certainly credible. However, regarding the "Apollo Program," the most ridiculous thing is that the United States—whether it is NASA or private entities like SpaceX—has been proven to lack the actual capability for "manned moon landing." This forces people to doubt that the original "Apollo moon landing" was merely a collaborative product of NASA and Hollywood.

However, I do not deny that if Americans have truly achieved decades of technological hegemony through Hollywood stunts, this is also a great thing, perhaps even a greater thing! But if that is the case, the United States will undoubtedly lose in the strategic competition with China in the future, because the Chinese are the least charming people on this planet; they are the most practical. And if that is really the case, if the United States truly loses to China next, it will further push back the events of that year.

The "Apollo program" is definitely fake.