{"text":[[{"start":6.6,"text":"The writer is an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and former head of North America for CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund"}],[{"start":14.95,"text":"At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang described AI as a five-layer infrastructure stack — energy, chips, cloud, models and applications. He argued that every nation must own the production of its own intelligence, naming the concept “sovereign AI”."}],[{"start":35.75,"text":"What began as a pitch to smaller nations seeking digital self-determination has now graduated into governing policy for the world’s two largest digital economies."}],[{"start":45.85,"text":"Earlier this month, President Trump said that the US government may acquire equity stakes in OpenAI, xAI and other frontier AI companies, with the American public becoming “a partner” in the AI economy."}],[{"start":58.900000000000006,"text":"This week, DeepSeek reportedly closed its first external funding round, which made it China’s most valuable AI-only start-up with a valuation of more than $50bn. China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund — the state vehicle Beijing uses to channel capital into strategic AI innovations — was a major investor and, notably, the only one to receive direct corporate ownership and voting rights."}],[{"start":84.10000000000001,"text":"Both the US and China have come to the same conclusion: AI is too strategically important to leave entirely to private markets. The sovereign AI race is officially making its way through Huang’s stack, from physical silicon to pure intelligence."}],[{"start":100.75,"text":"The US move did not emerge from nowhere. I argued in these pages last year that the Trump administration’s 10 per cent equity stake in Intel reflected a determination to preserve critical domestic semiconductor capabilities. The same goes for the proposed government stakes in OpenAI and its competitors, but a layer up in Huang’s stack."}],[{"start":121.05,"text":"China’s trajectory follows the same chip-to-model logic, but with a decade’s head start. The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund has long backed the semiconductor champions that supply the domestic AI ecosystem. Now the parallel AI fund extends the state capital flow from the layer that produces the substrate to the layer that runs on it."}],[{"start":144.75,"text":"Consider what didn’t happen after the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing last month. With Nvidia’s chief executive in the room, the US partially cleared sales of its second-tier H200 chips to select Chinese firms. But Beijing is blocking the purchase. China has built DeepSeek to run on domestic Huawei Ascend clusters — and now the state is buying in, no longer pricing DeepSeek as a software company."}],[{"start":169.1,"text":"On AI, both the US and China have shifted from regulation towards direct participation. Governments have long subsidised or protected strategic industries. But what is new is their growing willingness to become shareholders in frontier AI laboratories — treating them less as software start-ups and more as critical national infrastructure."}],[{"start":191.5,"text":"That distinction carries profound implications. Ownership creates influence. Once governments become equity holders, these AI companies face complex questions that traditional governance frameworks were never designed to resolve: how to balance national security objectives with shareholder returns; how boards should navigate tensions between commercial growth and strategic priorities; and whether they can simultaneously serve global markets while advancing national goals."}],[{"start":219.05,"text":"Most observers still view OpenAI and DeepSeek primarily as competitors. They are. But they are also expressions of the same structural trend: the world’s two largest economies showing a willingness to move state capital into increasingly strategic layers of the AI stack. The first phase focused on chips, the second on models. The next may concern the ownership and governance of intelligence itself."}],[{"start":251.70000000000002,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781834725_1622.mp3"}