As China’s economy lumbers amid property crisis, why hasn’t AI helped pick up the slack?

China's artificial intelligence sector is failing to offset the economic drag from the country's prolonged property crisis, according to Nomura chief China economist Lu Ting. AI investment in China totals roughly one trillion yuan annually, but that is far below the scale of property investment during the 2010s and represents only one-third the share of the U.S. economy, Lu said at a Beijing briefing Thursday. The technology risks widening China's economic bifurcation rather than boosting recovery, as the country faces capital market limitations and chip supply bottlenecks.

As China’s economy lumbers amid property crisis, why hasn’t AI helped pick up the slack? AI might be an economic panacea for the US, but it may not be one for China and the recovery of its real estate industry, one analyst says Ji Siqi /author/ji-siqi in Beijing China’s economy https://www.scmp.com/topics/chinas-economic-recovery?module=inline&pgtype=article amid its deep property crisis, as the technology can further widen the country’s economic bifurcation, an economist said. “AI isn’t boosting China’s economy as much as it is in the US , and we also have to worry about some of the negative side effects,” said Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura, at a media briefing in Beijing on Thursday. AI drives https://www.scmp.com/news/us/diplomacy/article/3356820/us-lawmakers-warn-next-revolution-ai-race-must-be-america-not-china?module=inline&pgtype=article about half of the US economy, Lu said, and its capital markets have mostly been propelled by the boom in the technology. US investment in AI has grown at roughly four times the pace of consumer spending, he added, showing that it had already made a massive impact on the world’s largest economy. investment in AI https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3354502/chinas-ai-start-funding-triples-us16b-first-quarter-amid-bets-llms-robotics?module=inline&pgtype=article roughly exceeds one trillion yuan US$147.82 billion per year – still much less than the scale of property investment during the 2010s. The share of AI investment in China’s overall economy is also much smaller, with the ratio only about one-third of that in the US, Lu said. “The US has well-developed capital markets, so it’s easy for companies like OpenAI to raise money,” he said. “And even if we, in China, want to invest in, for example, buying chips in bulk, we don’t have the means – other countries simply won’t sell to us. We’ve hit a major bottleneck here.”