Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Beijing’s approach to A.I. is intended to help Chinese tech companies make advancements despite Washington’s restrictions.</p><p>In the United States, companies like Google and Meta have spent billions on data centers. But in China, it is the government that has played a major role in financing A.I. infrastructure and hardware, including data centers, high-capacity servers and semiconductors.</p><p>To concentrate the country’s engineering talent, the Chinese government also financed a network of labs where much of its most advanced A.I. research takes place, often in collaboration with big tech companies like Alibaba and ByteDance.</p><p>Beijing has also directed banks and local governments to go on a lending spree that fueled hundreds of start-ups. Since 2014, the government has spent nearly $100 billion on a fund to grow the semiconductor industry, and in April said it would allocate $8.5 billion for young A.I. start-ups.</p><p>Local governments have set up entire neighborhoods that function as start-up incubators, like Dream Town in Hangzhou, a city in China’s south that is home to Alibaba and DeepSeek and is known as a hot spot for A.I. talent.</p><p>“For the government to help us cover even 10 or 15 percent of our early-stage research costs, that’s a huge benefit,” said Jia Haojun, the founder of Deep Principle, a Hangzhou start-up focused on using A.I. for chemical research that raised $10 million last year.</p><p>Different city districts offer competing incentives to lure start-ups to their areas. Deep Principle received a $2.5 million subsidy from a district in Hangzhou when the start-up moved to the city, Mr. Jia said. A local official helped him find office space and employee housing."</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/technology/china-ai.html" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">nytimes.com/2025/07/16/technol</span><span class="invisible">ogy/china-ai.html</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/China" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>China</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>BigTech</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Startups" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Startups</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Alibaba" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Alibaba</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ByteDance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ByteDance</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AIPolicy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AIPolicy</span></a></p>