China announces a state-backed AI fund

Chinese officials on Thursday announced a new state fund to invest in cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence.

Zheng Shanjie, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s economic planning agency, told reporters that the “state venture capital guidance fund” will bring in $138 billion over 20 years from local governments and private firms.

The fund comes two months after the Chinese firm DeepSeek unveiled its R1 artificial intelligence model, which quickly became one of the world’s top-performing systems — essentially China’s first model that can compete with those from Silicon Valley firms like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Since then, Chinese tech giant Alibaba has released its own model, called QwQ-32B, to rival DeepSeek and other major players.

The United States has tried to cut off China from its top AI chip companies, but the country still has managed to build AI models — either from smuggled chips or through, as DeepSeek claimed, efficient new means. A new and emboldened China now wants the world to know it’s ready to publicly write big checks to spur its domestic AI industry.