Power shifts begin in places most people never see – on assembly lines making batteries and robots, along transmission lines feeding data centre clusters, in local offices selling land and in labs training artificial intelligence models. The United States and China are using these quiet levers to construct different futures.

The contest will be decided not by slogans but by who builds the most productive, trusted and durable infrastructure. Those choices will shape billions of lives.

Yet, the US still dominates the frontier: its private investment in AI dwarfs China’s. American companies also produce most of the top-performing models. Scale on one side and cutting-edge innovation on the other define this competition.