TIME Reveals the 2025 AI 100 ListChinese Innovators: A Fleeting Trend or a Turning Point?
While OpenAI is still fine-tuning GPT-5 with a massive $500 million investment, three Chinese companies are making Western tech giants nervous with just a tenth of that cost. In TIME's latest list of the 2025 AI 100, three Chinese entrepreneurs—Ren Zhengfei, Liang Wenfeng, and Wang Xingxing—are featured alongside industry leaders like Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg. Just three years ago, Chinese faces on this list were rare. Now, they're on equal footing with Silicon Valley's elite. Is this a fleeting moment or a fundamental shift?
This rise reveals a new way of playing the AI game. If the global AI race is a marathon, Western competitors are fixated on the most expensive running shoes and perfect form. Meanwhile, Chinese competitors have quietly changed the track. Huawei's Ascend chips, with an 85% domestic supply chain, have slashed AI computing costs by more than half—like a homegrown bicycle catching up to a Western sports car. Even more disruptive, DeepSeek's large model achieves a 128K ultra-long text context that GPT-5 couldn't, all at a tenth of the cost. It’s like a smartphone outperforming a clunky supercomputer. Let's explore how Chinese AI is shifting from a follower to a rule-maker and what this means for the global tech landscape.
1. The Computing Revolution: Huawei's Ascend Chips Take Market Share
NVIDIA's Jensen Huang might not have anticipated that Huawei, after four years of US sanctions, would become its fiercest competitor. In 2024, Huawei's Ascend chip's global market share surged from 3% to 27%, while NVIDIA's plummeted from 95% to 58%. Even more shocking to the West, supercomputing centers in Germany and oil companies in Saudi Arabia are abandoning NVIDIA's latest GB300 in favor of the Ascend 910B chip. These clients aren't just looking to save money; they’ve found Huawei's chips to be more stable for industrial control applications.
This success is rooted in Huawei's relentless pursuit of localization. The EDA tools and architectural design for Ascend chips are now completely "de-Americanized," with a localization rate exceeding 85% in its supply chain. While the US focused on controlling lithography machines, Huawei adopted a "surround the cities from the countryside" strategy, building an entire chip ecosystem in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The news that ByteDance placed an order for 100,000 Ascend servers was a final blow to NVIDIA, proving that Chinese AI companies can not only build chips but can also get an entire industry to adopt a Chinese standard.
Huawei's comeback is not just a simple technological breakthrough; it's a dimensional reduction attack on Western monopolistic logic. While the global chip industry has been trapped in a shortsighted cycle of "selling computing power for quick money," companies like NVIDIA focused on iterating high-end GPUs to reap profits from the global market with exorbitant prices. In stark contrast, Huawei chose a different path: deeply embedding chip technology into industrial applications to build a closed ecosystem of "hardware + scenarios." From smart inspection robots in coal mines to automated loading and unloading systems at ports, Huawei's Ascend chips provide not just computing power but also serve as the core engine for driving industrial digitalization. This model, which deeply links technological value to the real economy, has instantly made the Western business model of relying solely on hardware sales uncompetitive.
What makes the West even more uneasy is the synergistic effect of Chinese industrial clusters. Luxshare Precision's high-speed connectors have broken through signal transmission bottlenecks, reducing data loss to one-third of the industry standard and providing a stable "neural network" for AI servers. Foxconn Industrial Internet's liquid-cooled AI servers, with a proprietary cooling system, have improved energy efficiency by 40%, successfully solving the heat dissipation problem in high-computation scenarios. These breakthroughs in niche areas have actually built a complete industry chain covering chip design, component manufacturing, and full-machine production. When domestic companies form a virtuous cycle of "technology R&D—product application—market feedback," China's rise in AI is no longer a series of isolated breakthroughs but a comprehensive breakthrough with ecosystem as its moat and systemic innovation as its weapon. This is precisely the "Chinese power" the West fears most.
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