Grace Hsiao

They're like, all right, let's go ask VCs, essentially, and go find future deep-seeks and fund them.

However, how much these companies want to take government money is a different discussion.

A lot of them will then even support them by providing, you know, infrastructure like buildings, offices, even like some of them heard like dormitory for these young entrepreneurs, and then give them money and capital to try things out.

There's also these AI pilot zones being rolled out across the country.

I think now about 11 or 12 of them where, you know, people can try out new AI products.

I met with the largest AI developer community founder in China a couple weeks ago, and she was saying there's more than a couple hundred thousand developers in this ecosystem, and they are working with regulators and the private sector.

So if, say, ByteDance have a new product, they might go to them first and say, can you try this out?

And then they will report and debug and see what's happening, and then tell the whoever local government that's funding them with providing the infrastructure, say, it's

hey, this product might come out.

Do you want to be part of it?

Do you want to give it money?

Do you want to provide it with whatever resource you want to?

So there is kind of this like cohesive ecosystem where they kind of all dance together.

How much these companies actually want to take state money, I think that's debatable.

However, as AI and robotics become more and more sensitive and being recognized as not only an economic driver, but potentially a military use or geopolitical driver,

I guess, talking point.

At this point, it is becoming more and more nationalized, not only in China, but globally in the US and so on.

Yeah, I think China, having been the manufacturing hub of like literally everything under the sun over the last like three decades, has definitely an advantage of owning all the supply chain, right?

And it's like not only just owning the supply chain, but, you know, there are literally regions where that whole supply from raw material to like the end product from OEM is all within like, say, 50 kilometers of each other.

So what we're seeing is a lot of American investors and entrepreneurs coming into China to kind of get a sense of that.