Did everyone forget about DeepSeek? What Wall -2-

Compute scarcity continues to weigh on Chinese development - yet it has created a mindset fundamentally at odds with the U.S. focus on brute-force scaling. OpenAI, the trailblazer for modern AI and the world's most valuable startup, has committed to $1.4 trillion of infrastructure spending in the coming years. In a blog post earlier this month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar linked the company's growth directly to the acquisition of more compute.

However, Alibaba's Lin shared a different perspective in Beijing. "Perhaps this is a longstanding question throughout history: Is innovation spurred by the hands of the rich or the poor?" he asked.

Lin posited that Silicon Valley's resource abundance could stifle development in more efficient architecture. "When you're poor, things like algorithm-infrastructure co-optimization become necessary," he observed. "If you're very rich, there's little incentive to do that."

Read: Forget chips: The next battleground in the U.S.-China AI race is nuclear power

-Christine Ji

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01-24-26 0830ET