12 Days of Broadband

Who Will Dominate AI: The U.S., China, Both or Neither?

A ‘Sputnick moment’ for AI. A new cold war – the race to superintelligence – is on.

Naomi Jindra

Dec 2, 2025 — 8 min read

The year 2025 began with an artificial intelligence jolt: DeepSeek, a large language model developed in Hangzhou, China’s “Silicon Valley,” shook global financial markets. The AI phenom became the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s app store in the U.S., beating even ChatGPT.

12 Days of Broadband 2025 (click to open)

On the First Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: One Carr driving the Federal Communications Commission.
On the Second Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: Two superpowers racing toward AI superintelligence dominance.
On the Third Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: Three branches of government (and some formerly independent agencies).
On the Fourth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: Four programs with Universal Service Funds.
On the Fifth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: 56 states and territories without digital equity grants.
On the Sixth Day of Broadband, my true level sent to me: Less than 6 months for a broadband permit.
On the Seventh Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: Data center-powered electricity bills up 70 percent.
On the Eighth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: 800 megahertz of spectrum to sell at auction.
On the Ninth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: $9 billion + 12 billion (or $21 billion) in BEAD remaining funds.
On the Tenth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: Not even $10/month for an affordable connectivity program.
On the Eleventh Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: Through BEAD and broadband, 110 million locations served.
On the Twelfth Day of Broadband, my true love sent to me: More than 1200 megahertz of spectrum for unlicensed wireless.

**Click to read each of the 12 Days of Broadband articles!**

Here, in spite of U.S. export controls keeping the most advanced chips by Nvidia out of the country, a Chinese AI startup appeared to have built a near-frontier AI model cheaply – and through open-source. It was a “Sputnick moment” if there ever was one for the U.S.

A new “cold war” – the race to superintelligence – was on.

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12 Days of Broadband AI Data Center China NVIDIA AMD Intel TSMC Taiwan DeepSeek OpenAI Elon Musk Meta Donald Trump Joe Biden CHIPS and Science Act Sriram Krishnan Brett Guthrie John Moolenaar House Select Committee on China PRC Gui Jiakun Alibaba Huawei Jawad Haj-Yahya SupplyChain CSIS Gregory Allen BIS Jensen Huang Hugging Face Samm Sacks superintelligence Infrastructure