There is a race going on between the US and China in AI, with companies from both companies trying to outdo each other. The stakes are high, so much so that the AI tussle has become part of geo-politics between these two countries. So, who will win the AI race? Well, if xAI and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is to be believed, the winner will probably be China.
But Musk, probably jokingly, also says that Earth is not the only arena where there is going to be an AI race. Musk believes that the game of AI will be won by different players in different arenas. He claims thatChina will be the overall AI leader, while Google will win the countries in Western hemisphere. And in space his own company SpaceX will take the lead.
Musk made comments as a quip on X while replying to comments from Bindu Reddy, CEO of Abacus AI and a former Google employee, who criticised Google’s recent progress in artificial intelligence. Reddy said the company’s Gemini 3.0 model did not meet expectations and that many users were still relying on the older Gemini 2.5 version. She suggested that Google should run more experiments in parallel and train multiple models at once instead of working on too many separate projects.
Responding to the post, Musk wrote, “Google will win the AI race in the West, China on Earth and SpaceX in space.”
Musk’s comments surprised X users as he suggested that China could actually win the AI race against the US. But there is a chance that Musk might have made his comments keeping in mind the current realities in the AI space. AI companies in China and the US are using different approaches and the Chinese approach may lead to a more widespread adoption of Chinese AI models.
American tech companies including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have been investing heavily in large language models, cloud AI services, and enterprise tools. However, many of these systems are paid, closed-source, or restricted, with access often limited to subscribers or business customers.
In contrast, several Chinese companies have been pushing open-source or low-cost AI models, making them easier to use and adapt. Firms such as Alibaba and startups like DeepSeek have released models that developers can run locally or modify freely, helping them gain popularity among researchers and smaller companies. This difference in approach is probably giving Beijing an edge even if the AI model quality is still better with the US AI companies.
Meanwhile, Musk has also hinted that his own company may not be focused on winning the AI race on this planet. Instead, his plans are aimed at space. Earlier this year, Elon Musk revealed plans to build orbital AI data centres by combining the strengths of his rocket company SpaceX and his AI startup xAI. The merger is reportedly valued at approximately $1.25 trillion.
As part of this plan, SpaceX would place computing infrastructure in Earth’s orbit and power it using solar energy in space. Building data centres in space would allow xAI to reduce energy costs and avoid some of the environmental challenges faced by data centres on Earth. Such systems could also support future missions involving autonomous spacecraft, satellite networks, and deep-space exploration.
