China is graduating 2 million engineers a year. The U.S. graduates 150,000. Jeff Towson explains what that gap means for AI.
Jeff Towson has spent 17 years on the ground in China studying tech companies that most Americans have never heard of. In this conversation, he breaks down how Huawei rebuilt its supply chain after the U.S. entity list ban, why DeepSeek and Qwen are eating into Silicon Valley margins, what Elon is actually doing with Colossus, and why the U.S. trying to choke off China’s access to AI chips is a strategy he calls “kind of evil.”
Timestamps:
0:00 – Jeff’s background: 17 years studying Chinese tech companies
3:00 – Huawei’s response to the U.S. entity list ban and the rise of HarmonyOS
7:30 – DeepSeek V4, Qwen, and why open-weight models are reshaping Silicon Valley costs
9:00 – Huawei’s CloudMatrix and the Ascend chip rollout
10:00 – The soft power of open-source AI in South America and Africa
12:00 – Is AI more like electricity or nuclear weapons?
14:00 – Why Beijing’s role in Chinese tech is misunderstood
16:00 – Smart vs. dumb governments, and where China’s infrastructure muscle comes from
19:00 – Why graduating 2 million engineers a year changes everything
21:00 – The H-1B debate and what China does instead
22:00 – Elon’s vertical integration play with Colossus and Optimus
27:00 – The Brockman-Altman lawsuit and Jeff’s take on platform editors
30:00 – Why “free speech” platforms don’t actually exist
34:00 – How smartphone information flows shape reality
38:00 – Book brain vs. network brain
40:00 – AI executive assistants and Jason’s daily voice-recording workflow
46:00 – Privacy in China vs. the U.S. (and Europe)
49:00 – Facial recognition in Chinese classrooms vs. American pushback
51:00 – Hard America vs. soft America
54:00 – Universal basic income, envy, and what humans are built for
58:30 – Robotics in China: the manufacturing story, the AI story, the ecosystem story
1:01:00 – Unitree’s leap from a basic humanoid to kung-fu robots in one year
1:03:00 – Thinking Machines Labs and the path to embodied AI
1:08:00 – Xiaomi, Baidu, and ecosystem plays over best-in-class models
1:14:00 – Why Jeff thinks Apple has stopped innovating
1:17:00 – Drug discovery, 500-IQ AI, and blowing past human intelligence
1:21:00 – The Manus deal, info-nationalism, and why AI is political ground
1:26:00 – The sci-fi closer: a sunnier Blade Runner
About this episode:
Jeffrey Towson, founder of TechMoat Consulting and one of the most-followed analysts in Asia, joins Jason Padgett for a wide-ranging 90-minute conversation about the U.S.-China tech competition. They cover Huawei’s recovery from the entity list ban, the rise of open-weight Chinese models like DeepSeek V4 and Qwen, China’s CloudMatrix data centers built on Ascend chips, the manufacturing dominance behind Chinese humanoid robots from Unitree and Galbot, and why Jeff thinks cutting off any country from general-purpose AI is the wrong move. They also get into the H-1B debate, Elon’s strategy with Colossus, platform governance, and why drug discovery may be where the U.S. has its own China-scale advantage.
About Jeff Towson:
Founder of TechMoat Consulting, host of The Tech Strategy Podcast, and author of the Moats and Marathons book series. Based in Asia and the U.S. Former Head of Direct Investments for Middle East North Africa and Asia Pacific for Prince Alwaleed. MBA from Columbia, MD from Stanford School of Medicine, BA in Physics from Pomona College. 2.9M+ LinkedIn followers. Named the #1 LinkedIn Top Voice for Finance globally in 2017.
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
TechMoat Consulting β
Huawei β
DeepSeek β
Alibaba Qwen β
Moonshot Kimi β
Unitree Robotics β
Galbot β
Xiaomi β
BYD β
Baidu β
Tencent β
Thinking Machines Lab β
xAI Colossus β
Anthropic β
Google DeepMind β
The Second Machine Age (book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee)
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