With the two leading AI powers, the United States and China, creating their own AI blocks, other countries are maneuvering to leverage the group’s power and not lose.
As competition intensifies, experts say the window for countries to choose freely between the two AI superpowers may narrow, forcing them to choose between the US-led Pax Silica and the China-inspired World AI Cooperation Organization.
That could leave many countries in a dilemma: Should they use the most advanced AI chips and technology in the US, or join China’s more affordable open-source AI systems?
Kazakhstan, a country in Central Asia with about 21 million people, is a rare example of a country that is trying to bridge the gap.
Just three weeks after AI minister Zhaslan Madiyev visited Washington in June to join a US group working to strengthen AI supply chains, he went to Shanghai for a signing ceremony making the Central Asian country a founding member of China’s initiative to shape the global AI agenda.
Being at Pax Silica means more technology partnerships, high-tech manufacturing projects and a place in the global AI supply chain.
At the same time, as part of China’s World AI Cooperation Organization along with 28 other early founding countries including Pakistan and Russia, Kazakhstan hopes to also have a voice in setting regional and global AI standards.
“Everybody is hedging,” said Dana Masalimova, a former Kazakhstan diplomat and independent scholar and center associate at the Kathryn W and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
“We don’t want this binary choice,” Masalimova said.
Kazakhstan has benefited from US and Chinese investment, but is at a “very precarious point,” he said.
It has rich critical mineral resources that are important for AI development and has cheap electricity to power data centers, which has become a political issue in the US.
Earlier this year, the Kazakhstan government signed an investment agreement worth up to USD 10 billion involving Nvidia to build a “data center valley” in the country.
Meanwhile, more Chinese companies are investing in Kazakhstan. Local officials say China’s foreign direct investment in Kazakhstan will reach a record USD 2.8 billion by 2025.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in July to expand cooperation in China’s global infrastructure development Belt and Road initiative.
China and the US are using access to AI to increase their global influence.
President Donald Trump asserted last month that “whoever wins AI, wins”. US officials and AI companies have accused China of “distillation,” or the extraction of large-scale capabilities, from the American model.
Beijing has rejected these claims and says the US is seeking to monopolize AI while limiting China’s access to some of the world’s most advanced AI chips and chip-making machines.
Washington has signaled that Pax Silica – with China as an implicit target – is only for those it trusts.
“States cannot trust their partners in Pax Silica when they substantially engage in initiatives that advance competing visions of super-intelligence,” the US State Department said, using the Trump administration’s new term of choice for AI.
For its part, Beijing expressed the openness and inclusiveness of the World AI Cooperation Organization.
“As the two leading countries in AI, China and the United States should use their respective strengths in AI instead of protecting each other,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement. “AI should not be owned by major countries.”
The two AI powers have different messaging because Beijing needs to court third countries in an effort to build an alternative coalition, while Washington already has a strong network of allies, said Kyle Chan, a fellow at The Brookings Institution’s John L Thornton China Center.
That gave power to what he described as a “swing state”.
Like Kazakhstan, Indonesia has important resources for AI and other technologies, such as nickel and copper. It is also seeking to maximize the power of AI, after joining China’s World AI Cooperation Organization.
Indonesia wants to benefit from both, Mari Pangestu, vice-chairman of the Indonesian National Economic Council, told reporters at the University of Hong Kong Business School event. “We have to be able to be part of both, something like that. And choose the best system.”
US AI companies are bringing their investments to other countries such as Singapore, where Anthropic is setting up its latest Asian office. The city-state said it is also considering joining China’s AI organization.
In Saudi Arabia, AI startup Humain opened in September a platform built on an open model by a Chinese AI company. The kingdom also has a deal with Nvidia to develop AI computing with advanced chips.
France, one of the most ambitious AI developers besides the US and China, is going its own way with the startup Mistral, whose new model released this month outstrips some advanced Chinese models.
Japan is close to the US on strategic and security issues, including advanced semiconductors, AI and trusted standards.
But it won’t rule out more affordable Chinese AI models for “lower-cost applications,” said Takahiro Tsuchiya, a professor at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies.
For countries like the UK and Germany that have considerable economic and military capacity, but lack strong frontier AI models of their own, aligning with the US may be important for access to data centers and chip deals with US companies, said Anton Leicht and Sam Winter-Levy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Essentially, access to advanced AI systems “depends on the will of policymakers in Washington and Beijing,” he said, while those countries may have limited influence over the future of AI.
China, meanwhile, has closed the technology gap with the US when it comes to chipmaking and advanced AI capabilities, but it still trails the top US technology capabilities, at least for now.
In addition, Beijing’s open-source approach allows countries to rely less on the US, and China has provided funding for developing countries to develop their own AI ecosystems, said Alberto Lemma, a researcher at think tank ODI Global.
So far, China has provided official sector grants and loans for projects and activities that use or enable AI technology in at least 77 low- and middle-income countries, according to the AidData research laboratory at William & Mary, a public university in Virginia.
Some of the top recipients include Nigeria, Zambia, Ghana, Bangladesh, Senegal, Cameroon, and Kenya. Public perception is also changing. The results of a new study from the Pew Research Center show that people in middle-income countries are becoming more positive and trusting of China when it comes to AI and regulation of the technology.
All things considered, many countries “don’t want to pick sides … because there are advantages and disadvantages to each technology stack,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Most countries may not have a good choice because they cannot compete to build an AI frontier model, but “every country in the world in one way or another is thinking about AI sovereignty,” he said.
After all, “Probably no other country except the US and China can build this huge and powerful model”.
Published on October 25, 2026