The geopolitics of AI and robotics: China, the US and Japan

Artificial intelligence and robotics are not just technologies — they are the catalysts for the most transformative era in human history. The coming age of embodied superintelligence, where machines don’t just think but act in the physical world, will reorganize global economies and security structures more profoundly than steam, oil or nuclear power once did.

This race is not evenly distributed: the three decisive players are China, the United States and Japan. Each enters the contest with a different civilizational inheritance, economic model and strategic orientation.

Part I: China — the engineering state returns

China’s resurgence is best seen through the lens of its civilizational arc. For over half of the last two millennia, China was the world’s largest economy. Its culture radiated outward into East and South Asia, shaping writing systems, philosophies, medicines, cuisines and political institutions. The “Middle Kingdom” was less an aspirational myth than an operating reality.

Unlike Europe’s empires, China rarely pursued conquest abroad. The voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the 15th century, with their treasure fleets, brought gifts rather than colonization. Legitimacy inside China was grounded not in procedure but in performance — the ability of rulers to deliver prosperity and stability. From the mythic Yu the Engineer, who tamed the Yellow River, to modern infrastructure marvels like high-speed rail, China has long understood itself as an engineering society, a tradition that continues today: much of the country’s top leadership, including President Xi Jinping with his degree in chemical engineering, has a background in STEM.

What China calls its “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers and Japan was an aberration. The Opium Wars epitomized exploitation: Britain forced addictive drugs onto China to finance its trade deficit and the empire’s footprint — from Hong Kong to India — was designed largely around controlling Chinese trade. Today’s Chinese resurgence is not so much a rise as a return to historical normality.

Economically, China is already the world’s largest by purchasing power parity and is projected to surpass the US in nominal GDP within the next decade. It leads in electric vehicles (BYD, NIO, Xpeng) and solar manufacturing, industries critical to the 21st-century energy economy. This dominance extends from manufacturing to production: China is the world’s largest producer of renewable energy, harnessing power from engineering marvels like the Three Gorges Dam to the largest solar and wind farms on the planet. It is also rapidly expanding its nuclear power capacity, positioning itself to become the world’s top producer within the decade.

In AI and robotics, China is advancing at a remarkable pace: Humanoid prototypes from companies like Unitree and UBTech are maturing, while Chinese labs have surged ahead in video generation — the core of world-model learning that powers physical intelligence. Open-source models from labs like DeepSeek are rapidly closing the gap and, in some domains, even challenging the lead of Western counterparts.

Crucially, China commands the physical supply chain. It refines the vast majority of the world’s rare earths, controls much of the cobalt supply chain from the Democratic Republic of Congo and manufactures 80% of global lithium-ion batteries. This command of upstream inputs gives China leverage that Western rhetoric cannot undo. While American and European investors speculated on crypto, Beijing built railways, ports and industrial parks, remaining consistent with China’s engineering ethos.

Part II: The United States — capitalism and its discontents

The United States exemplifies the Anglo-American capitalist model, where capital allocation is the supreme organizing principle. This model has historically driven explosive innovation. From the Industrial Revolution’s descendants to the software giants of Silicon Valley, the US has repeatedly shown that deep capital markets, entrepreneurial risk-taking and talent magnetism can change the world.

Yet the weaknesses are clear. Externalities — from environmental damage to decaying infrastructure — are systematically underpriced. By offshoring manufacturing, the US hollowed out the tacit knowledge and dense supply chains required for physical industries. Infrastructure tells the story: China has built 25,000 miles of high-speed rail, while the US struggles to connect Boston to Washington at 100 miles per hour.

The limits of onshoring are clear in the case of TSMC’s Arizona semiconductor fabs. Despite tens of billions in subsidies, the chips produced cost more than in Taiwan, with most supply chain inputs still imported. Manufacturing ecosystems cannot be transplanted overnight; they require decades of tacit expertise, supplier networks and cultural practices. Similarly, tariffs on imports do little in an economy with near-full employment. They can shift labor into less productive activities or, more damagingly, price purchasers out of the market for essential goods. This demand destruction, particularly for industrial inputs, can perversely accelerate deindustrialization.

Still, the US retains formidable advantages. It leads in frontier AI labs — Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic — and dominates the semiconductor design space through Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm. Its venture capital ecosystem can rapidly deploy billions. The challenge is whether the US can adapt its software-driven strengths to an embodied AI world where manufacturing, robotics and energy infrastructure are as critical as data and algorithms.

Part III: Japan — the robotics archipelago

If AI is brains, robotics is bodies — and Japan is the world’s largest and most mature robotics ecosystem. Beyond firms like Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki and Denso, Japan’s strength lies in its intricate layers of suppliers, integrators and expertise. This “industrial memory” is nearly impossible to replicate. For decades, Japanese automation has powered global manufacturing from automotive plants to semiconductor fabs.

Japan’s trajectory, however, has been constrained by its relationship with the US. The postwar alliance ensured stability but also limited autonomy. The Plaza Accord of 1985, which forced the yen to appreciate and effectively ended Japan’s high-growth era, remains a reminder of how US leverage has clipped Japan’s wings.

Looking forward, Japan can play a bridging role. Its culture already integrates Chinese and Western legacies — kanji from China, katakana for Western imports. Geopolitically, Japan could serve as the “red telephone” between Washington and Beijing, reducing the risk of destructive confrontation. To do so credibly, Japan must confront its own prejudices toward China, investing in education, empathy and cultural humanization. If it succeeds, China may welcome Japan’s role as an intermediary.

The most promising path is a US-Japan robotics and AI alliance. The US dominates frontier AI research; Japan dominates embodied robotics. Together, they could provide a formidable counterweight to China’s manufacturing-led strategy while revitalizing their own economies. A successful partnership would set the conditions for near- to mid-term global deployment at scale, fusing the US’s planetary-level compute infrastructure and venture capital markets with Japan’s unparalleled mastery of the physical world.

While China’s state-led model excels at monolithic software-hardware integration, a US-Japan alliance holds a different strategic advantage: the ability to foster an open and distributed global ecosystem. By championing open standards, they could develop a superfactory network — a coalition of manufacturers from Europe, India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia all building on a shared intelligence platform. The power of this decentralized model lies in its ability to enable the mass customization of robotics, generating an infinite variety of specialized robots at scale and igniting a Cambrian explosion of robotics tailored for every conceivable niche — a compelling alternative to a centralized, monolithic approach.

Toward constructive competition

China’s rise should not be feared but respected. It is not cheating; it is operating under a different model. Neither the Anglo-American model of capital dominance nor the Chinese model of engineering-led governance is considered complete. Both are approximations of a framework that I call the Alignment Economy, a system where prices reflect their true impact on collective human freedom and flourishing, a concept explored further in my book “The Rise of Superintelligence.”

Until we realize such a system, the path forward is clear:

• Respect China’s resurgence as an inevitability.
• Compete vigorously but constructively, avoiding the trap of zero-sum framing.
• Expand US-Japan collaboration in robotics and AI as a win-win for both economies.
• Encourage Japan to take a neutral intermediary role, bridging the US and China and reducing systemic risk.

The stakes are immense. AI and robotics will not just shape who wins economically — they will shape the destiny of human civilization and life as we know it. To meet this challenge, industry-leading countries must not only compete but also respect, collaborate and ultimately align for the sake of humanity’s future.

[Author’s note: These themes are not abstract for me. As cofounder and CEO of Integral AI, which is based in Silicon Valley and Tokyo, I am working directly at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and Japanese robotics in the automotive and factory automation industry.]

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