United States President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping are set to meet in Washington, DC on Thursday for a summit that is expected to cover trade, artificial intelligence (AI), Taiwan and the US-Israel war on Iran. In advance of the talks, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington had proposed an AI “notification mechanism” with China – effectively a hotline to alert each other when AI incidents threaten national security. The meeting comes as leading AI companies warn about the technology’s risks, while both superpowers push to accelerate their AI race.
In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera compares the US and China’s AI strength in computing power, AI models, spending and research. Training and running AI requires enormous amounts of computing power. The more powerful chips and computers a country has, the faster it can build and improve AI models, making computing power one of the biggest advantages in the AI race.
Computing power is measured in FLOP/s (floating-point operations per second) – or how many calculations a computer can perform in one second. Adding up the computing power of all the AI chips a country has gives a sense of its total AI capacity. By that measure, the US is well ahead, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the world’s total AI computing power, while China holds just more than 14 percent, according to Epoch AI, an AI research institute.
The US lead comes largely from its access to the most advanced chips. US company Nvidia accounts for more than 60 percent of global AI computing capacity among major chip designers, while China’s Huawei holds a much smaller, but growing share, according to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index. Those chips also need somewhere to run.
The US has more than 5,400 data centres – the large buildings which house thousands of computers – about 10 times as many as any other country. It also leads in dedicated AI data centres, with 84, more than the next eight countries combined. Frontier models are the most advanced AI systems, such as OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek’s models in China.
They are trained using vast amounts of data and computing power to write, reason and code. The US has led the development of these models, but Chinese models are gaining ground. As of March 2026, US and Chinese AI models were closely matched on Arena, a leaderboard where users compare two anonymous models and vote for the better answer.
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