Elon Musk highlights China's strengths in AI, calls them ‘toughest competitors’

Musk claims xAI will ‘soon be far beyond’ world tech companies including Google

Elon Musk highlights Chinas strengths in AI, calls them ‘toughest competitors’
Elon Musk highlights China's strengths in AI, calls them ‘toughest competitors’

In a surprising shift, tech mogul Elon Musk has changed his views on the global AI race, identifying China as the primary competitor to his startup, xAI.

According to StoryBoard, this declaration, shared on X, diverges from his previous narrative positioning xAI squarely against rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.

Musk's new strategic outlook is rooted in China's significant advantages in two critical areas: electricity and hardware manufacturing.

He argues that the country's vast energy capacity and world-leading production of components like semiconductors and server racks will provide a decisive edge in the resource-intensive development of advanced AI.

This perspective highlights a fundamental shift in the AI arms race from a focus on talent and algorithms to the sheer scale of infrastructure. As AI data centers demand increasingly immense amounts of power, Musk has previously warned of potential US grid constraints.

His latest comments suggest that China's superior capacity to power and build the necessary hardware could allow its companies to outpace American competitors in the long run.

In a post on X, Tesla boss wrote, “Soon, xAI will be far beyond any company except Google, and then significantly surpass Google.”

“China has much more electricity than the US, and very strong companies in building hardware,” he added later.

Notably, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, Chinese tech giants, have already launched more than ten AI model updates only in 2025.

Meanwhile, xAI has also released a Grok app update, which is now at version v1.1.58. The new version brings AI video generation capabilities, allowing the creation of visual content directly through the platform, something that can attract content creators, developers and companies.

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