China elevates AI to core national strategy in post‑market policy note

While the underlying State Council meeting was first reported by Xinhua, this June 30 post-market note is important because it spells out how Chinese markets are interpreting Beijing’s AI message. The column frames AI as a “core national competitiveness” battleground in long-term competition with the US, with explicit emphasis on breaking chip and tool bottlenecks and rapidly rolling out ultra-large compute clusters. That’s a clear signal to local investors and enterprises that AI infrastructure, from GPUs to datacenters to base models, will enjoy sustained policy tailwinds rather than being a short-lived fad.

For the race to AGI, this matters in two ways. First, it suggests that China will continue trying to close the compute and infrastructure gap despite export controls, using state-aligned capital to push domestic chips, accelerators, and model stacks. Second, the focus on “AI+” deployments in manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and transport means more real-world data and feedback for China’s model developers, even if they lag slightly on raw frontier benchmarks. A broad base of applied AI can still support serious AGI research by funding talent, creating diverse tasks, and justifying ever-larger training runs.

The takeaway is that Beijing is not backing off AI despite global macro and regulatory turbulence; it’s tightening the link between national security, industrial policy, and long-horizon AI investment. That reinforces the likelihood that AGI progress will be shaped by a two‑bloc competition in compute and deployment scale as much as by any single lab’s breakthroughs.