China vs US: Who is winning the AI race, in four charts

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.Who has more computing power?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 ...