RiskReversal Pod Deirdre Bosa: You Can't Ignore How Little China Spends on AI CapEx
Nov 12, 2025
Deirdre Bosa, host of CNBC's Tech Check and expert on AI and tech developments, joins Dan Nathan for a fascinating discussion. They explore China's rapidly growing open-source AI capabilities and its commoditization strategy. Bosa highlights the stark contrast in AI capital expenditures between the U.S. and China, and the potential global implications. They also dissect significant investments from companies like Meta and CoreWeave, while addressing concerns over power constraints and evolving investor sentiment in the tech sector.
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China's Commoditization Of AI Models
- China is pursuing a commoditization strategy for AI by offering efficient open-source models widely.
- That approach could make Chinese models the default infrastructure developers build on worldwide.
Base Models Define The AI Ecosystem
- If models are cheaper and good enough, developers will build on them globally, creating platform lock-in.
- Whoever controls the base models controls the AI ecosystem above them.
U.S. Outspends China On AI CapEx
- Chinese cloud players plan far lower CapEx than U.S. counterparts yet produce competitive models.
- That suggests China gets more bang for its AI investment through efficiency and model distillation.