🔒 The great AI schism. China’s offensive in the Global South

While the West gets bogged down in debates over algorithm safety and a compliance thicket, Beijing is quietly delivering turnkey computing infrastructure to Asia, Africa and Latin America. For European tech companies planning global expansion, it’s a harbinger of a painful split in the market.

Redakcja

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, which wrapped up in July 2026, barely registered in the European media, which is a shame. Policymakers in Europe, busy preparing the EU’s AI Act, once again slept through a market inflection point. In Shanghai, Beijing officially switched the Belt and Road Initiative (“New Silk Road”) onto new tracks—this time digital. China’s offer to emerging markets is simple: free subsidies for building data centers, preferential cloud rates and broad technology transfer. All of that without EU moralizing and U.S. export controls.

Cheap megawatts instead of ethics lectures

Over the past few years, Washington has steadily cut Chinese industry off from Nvidia’s advanced chips. But the July summit showed the sanctions policy backfired. Instead of slowing development, it forced China to accelerate work on its own architecture. New generations of Huawei Ascend chips and Biren processors already make up a closed hardware ecosystem that successfully runs powerful generative models.