Who’s really winning the US-China tech war?

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The “tech war” between the US and China has not stopped. But you won’t find the latest updates in press conferences or server halls. You will find them in factories and power grids.The United States still owns the frontier in models and money. China sets the price of the hardware that electrifies and automates the world. The scoreboard is tighter than most headlines suggest because the bottlenecks have changed. This is now a race for kilowatt-hours, packaging, supply chains and distribution from spaceWho owns the frontier models?In terms of compute, the US is clearly ahead. In fact, it accounts for almost 75% of global AI supercomputer performance.By following the capital, the same patterns emerge. The Stanford AI Index puts US private AI investment at $109.1 billion in 2024, almost twelve times China’s $9.3 billion. That money translates into model training, talent hiring and long contracts for compute. It is the cleanest single indicator that the United States leads at the top end of AI.Corporate capex makes the point even sharper. Microsoft said it will invest about $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to build AI data centers. Meta has lifted its 2025 capex to a range of $66 to $72 billion. Alphabet raised its 2025 capex plan to roughly $85 billion. This is a firm-led industrial policy, whether Washington intends it or not.But there is also a hard ceiling called power.US electricity demand is rising to record highs in 2025 and 2026 as data centers multiply. The Energy Information Administration expects commercial electricity sales to climb three percent in 2025 and another four and a half percent in 2026. PJM, the largest US grid operator, now forecasts about 30 gigawatts of new peak load from data centers by 2030 and is fast-tracking rules to connect them. If interconnections and new generation lag, the US AI lead becomes a cost problem.Where costs are set: the factory flywheelChina sets the global price curves in the technologies that power and automate AI-era economies. In solar, China controls more than 80% of capacity at every stage of the PV supply chain. That manufacturing weight is why panel prices and storage-coupled solar projects keep getting cheaper worldwide.In batteries, CATL and BYD together held about 56% of global EV battery usage in the first half of 2025. Scale here does two things. It depresses costs for electrification and it keeps factorie...

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