Experts Warn China Uses 5,400-to-450 Data Center Gap to Leapfrog U.S. AI

3 articles · Updated · Fox News · Sep 22

DHS last week warned of "industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns" by Chinese companies, reinforcing experts' claim that Beijing is extracting proprietary capabilities from top U.S. AI models.
Leah Siskind said Chinese labs use distillation to copy the logic of larger American systems, helping models such as DeepSeek compete after investing only a fraction of the resources.
That shortcut offsets a major U.S. hardware edge—more than 5,400 data centers versus roughly 450 in China—while Beijing also pushes free open-source models that experts say could embed censorship or backdoors.
Gordon Chang said the strategy mirrors China's solar-panel playbook: undercut U.S. rivals on cost, drive them from the market, then dominate globally.
Ahead of Xi Jinping's U.S. visit this week, the experts urged Washington to tighten chip-export loopholes, blacklist deceptive foreign labs and back U.S. open-source AI to protect democratic control of advanced systems.