Playing both sides of the U.S.-China AI “Cold War”
Rest of World Kinling Lo ● Covered by 8 sources
Saudi Arabia’s new Arabic AI model was built on Chinese tech. It’s the latest sign that countries want U.S. chips and Chinese models at the same time.
Based on reporting by Rest of World, Kinling Lo — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Saudi Arabia just rolled out what it calls the world’s most advanced Arabic-language AI model. The twist is obvious and awkward for Washington: the model, Humain-m3, is built on open-source technology from Chinese startup MiniMax, even as the kingdom pours money into AI infrastructure with American firms.
That split is becoming a pattern. From Latin America to Southeast and Central Asia, governments are buying U.S. chips while leaning on Chinese open-source models, dividing their AI projects between the two superpowers. Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution said many countries, especially in the Global South, want the best of both worlds and do not see Chinese technology through the same security lens Washington does.
Brazil showed how that looks in practice. In August, it announced roughly $444 million in AI investment and split it across two tracks. About $255 million is going toward supercomputing infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro with Huawei and iFlytek. The other roughly $189 million is meant for a separate supercomputer that Brazil is still tendering, with Nvidia expected to supply it. Brasília said the point was not to depend on one company, one technology, or one country.
That is where the U.S. runs into a hard limit. As Jesse Marks of the Australian National University put it, frontier AI is too expensive for most governments to build from scratch, so they pick and choose which layers they can control and which ones they have to buy. The U.S. has leverage where its hardware and cloud systems are hard to replace. But outside the circle of trusted or wealthy partners, Marks said, the default becomes Chinese AI or open models.
China is pushing that opening. Huawei is bidding for AI data centers in Egypt, and Malaysia is weighing Huawei’s Ascend 910C accelerators for its sovereign AI push. Washington has responded with its own outreach, including the U.S.-ASEAN AI Spark initiative. But if the White House starts warning countries against joining both camps, it may get the opposite of what it wants: more countries hedging, not fewer.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when AI turns into infrastructure instead of ideology: governments shop around. Washington keeps acting like everyone must pick a flag, but most states are picking a bill, a benchmark, and a backup plan. That’s not betrayal; that’s procurement.
Read more about this at: Rest of World