China’s $295B answer to chip bans

Beijing went all-in. Reports Thursday detailed China’s $295 billion compute plan, a five-year buildout of a unified national network targeting 2028, funded largely through ultra-long-term sovereign bonds. At least 80% of the hardware, including AI chips, must come from domestic suppliers like Huawei — Nvidia and AMD are deliberately excluded. China Mobile and China Telecom will run most of the data centers. With power-grid integration, total investment could reach $735 billion. This is intelligence as state infrastructure, not a vendor purchase.

Private capital is writing checks at the same scale. Bezos’s Prometheus raise pulled in $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation for a 150-person team building AI to design physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds. A day earlier, NEURA’s $1.4 billion Series C closed — what it calls the largest round ever for a full-stack robotics company — with Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, and Tether co-investing. The frontier money is moving off the screen and into the physical world.

Agents, meanwhile, are graduating to days-long autonomy. OpenAI’s Ona acquisition buys cloud sandboxes that let Codex agents — now past 5 million weekly users — run 24/7 across multi-day tasks. The same tooling has a dark mirror: Google’s phishing lawsuit alleges a China-based operation used Gemini to spin up more than 9,000 fake sites tied to over 1 million fraudulent URLs. The execution layer is where the next race is being run.