This is your Beijing Bytes: US-China Tech War Updates podcast.
Hey listeners, Ting here diving into the absolute chaos that is the US-China tech war right now, and trust me, it's heating up faster than a GPU under load.
Let's start with the cyberattack situation because it's genuinely wild. Taiwan's National Security Bureau just dropped a report showing that China launched 2.63 million intrusion attempts per day targeting Taiwan's critical infrastructure last year, which is more than double the 1.23 million from 2023. Even wilder? Cyberattacks on Taiwan's energy infrastructure jumped tenfold. Meanwhile, a China-linked threat actor called DarkSpectre has been running the Zoom Stealer campaign affecting 2.2 million users across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, stealing meeting data that could fuel corporate espionage. This isn't some theoretical risk anymore, listeners, this is happening right now.
On the chip front, things are getting spicy. Nvidia is aiming to start shipping its H200 AI chips to China by mid-February, potentially fulfilling orders for 40,000 to 80,000 units. But here's the catch, the US Commerce, State, Energy, and Defense departments are reviewing whether to even allow those sales. Meanwhile, ByteDance is planning to spend roughly 14 billion dollars on Nvidia chips in 2026 if the H200 gets approved. It's basically a game of technological poker where each move matters enormously.
China's throwing serious resources at this race too. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Beijing has spent 900 billion dollars over the past decade on AI, quantum, and biotech development, outpacing US investment and spending twice as much on quantum tech alone. DeepSeek is making headlines with its advanced thinking features and a new technical paper proposing rethinking deep learning architecture entirely. Meanwhile, Chinese quant fund Ubiquant launched an LLM claiming to rival GPT-5.1 and Claude using far fewer parameters.
Here's what keeps me up at night though, the supply chain vulnerability situation. The US depends on China for 70 percent of rare earth elements overall and 99 percent of heavy rare earths. In semiconductors, 30 percent of printed circuit boards and 60 percent of essential chemicals come from China. Biotech is even worse with 80 percent of key starting materials and 33 percent of global active pharmaceutical ingredient capacity sourced from China. As one analyst put it, China may not build the best AI models, but they could win the market if they can power and deploy AI at scale.
The geopolitical implications are massive. The US Space Force is entering 2026 amid escalating threats, with China operating over 1,060 satellites dedicated to intelligence and surveillance. Europe's watching nervously while London becomes the unexpected frontline for the robotaxi battle between US and Chinese companies.
Thanks for tuning in, listeners. Make sure you subscribe for more updates on this ongoing technological showdown.
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