The world has entered a new industrial era, but most people have not realized it yet. The resource that determines global power is no longer oil, steel, or even semiconductors. The new foundation of national strength is compute at scale. Any country that seeks global influence must command it, and two nations are moving faster than everyone else: the United States and China.

Compute is now the engine that turns data into intelligence. Intelligence powers every critical system in society. It shapes research, defense, industry, medicine, and national strategy. The countries that build and control massive compute capacity will define the next century. The countries that lack it will find themselves dependent on others for the most important technology in human history.

Frontier AI systems grow from massive clusters of GPUs and advanced chips that run continuously. Compute capacity determines the scope of scientific discovery, the quality of national defense, the sophistication of industrial automation, and the speed at which an economy can reinvent itself. Nations with deep compute resources advance faster. Nations without these resources fall behind.

Compute has become a strategic asset. It is the hard power behind modern intelligence.

The United States built the strongest compute ecosystem in the world. This strength comes from a combination of innovation, capital, and a culture that rewards breakthrough ideas.

The U.S. advantage rests on five areas of leadership.

Leadership in AI Chips
NVIDIA sets the global performance frontier.
AMD, Google, AWS, and Cerebras strengthen the ecosystem.

Hyperscale Cloud Providers
Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud operate the largest GPU fleets on Earth.
These fleets support training runs with more than one hundred thousand accelerators.

Frontier-AI Laboratories Located in the U.S.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta FAIR push global capability forward.

Ownership of the Software Stack
CUDA, PyTorch, JAX, and TensorFlow come from the United States.
The global AI community builds on U.S. frameworks.

Strategic Regulatory Position
Export controls limit access to frontier NVIDIA chips, creating structural advantage.

The United States stands as the leading compute power of the world.

China understands the strategic value of compute. It invests aggressively in cloud, chips, and national infrastructure. Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, and Baidu operate large-scale clusters. Huawei builds domestic AI chips capable of training large models without relying on U.S. technology. China has the talent and capital to create a parallel compute ecosystem that aligns with its long-term national goals.

China also benefits from scale and unified strategy. It treats AI capability as a matter of national strength. It builds compute rapidly and with purpose.

However, China faces real obstacles.
It does not have access to leading NVIDIA chips.
Its domestic chip architecture trails U.S. performance.
Its software ecosystem remains separate from CUDA-driven global standards.

Even with limitations, China remains the only nation moving at a scale comparable to the United States.

Europe
Europe operates impressive research supercomputers such as JUPITER and LUMI. These systems excel in HPC workloads. Europe, however, lacks domestic AI chip leadership and does not operate cloud platforms with the scale of U.S. or Chinese hyperscalers.

United Arab Emirates
The UAE, through G42, is building some of the largest AI systems outside the U.S. and China. The speed and ambition are impressive. Although the UAE relies heavily on U.S. hardware, it positions itself as a crucial global player.

Japan, Korea, and India
These countries are expanding sovereign compute infrastructure. They are making progress, but they remain dependent on imported hardware and smaller cloud ecosystems.

These regions contribute meaningfully to the global landscape. None of them operate at the scale required to compete for superpower status.

The rise of compute as a national strategic asset requires a new mindset in venture capital. Investors cannot evaluate AI companies based only on model quality, product velocity, or team strength. The real competitive advantage now comes from access to compute and the ability to secure long-term capacity. Startups that lack a compute strategy face structural limitations that will appear early and compound over time. Companies that secure early access to cloud credits, sovereign compute programs, hyperscaler partnerships, or specialized hardware will innovate faster and widen the gap quickly. Compute is a moat. It is a barrier to entry. It is a multiplier of enterprise value. Founders who understand this will build durable companies. Founders who ignore compute scarcity will hit ceilings they cannot break.

The competition between the United States and China is structural in nature. Compute determines who leads in innovation, national defense, scientific discovery, and economic growth. Both nations recognize AI as a foundation of national power. Both nations are building massive compute ecosystems to secure their futures.

This creates direct competition.
It will shape global alignment.
It will define the next several decades.

Nations that control compute will control intelligence, and nations that control intelligence will shape the world.

The world is shifting into an intelligence-driven economy. Compute is the essential fuel. The United States leads because it controls the most advanced chips, the largest clouds, the strongest AI labs, and the software platforms that power the global ecosystem. China is the only nation capable of competing at similar scale and invests accordingly. Other regions will influence the landscape, but will not determine it.

The next global superpower will be the nation that controls the most advanced and most abundant compute infrastructure. Both the United States and China understand this clearly. Their competition will define global progress in the decades ahead.

xoxo,

Maximillian Diez,

GP, Twenty Five Ventures

P.S. Stay with me on this journey. 

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