The White House’s AI Action Plan, along with tighter export controls on advanced chips and AI equipment, underscores that technology policy has become a key geopolitical issue. Controls can slow competitors’ access to the latest tools, but they are ineffective unless paired with a long-term plan to rebuild America’s innovation engine.
The original Moonshot succeeded not because of a single breakthrough but because the United States committed to a sustained national effort. At its peak, NASA made up 4.4% of the federal budget, employed 400,000 workers and coordinated 20,000 private-sector contractors.
The result was decades of scientific and commercial spillovers that transformed entire industries. Today’s strategic competition focuses on semiconductors and artificial intelligence—domains in which scale, talent and long-term R&D determine leadership.
Washington has made some positive moves. The CHIPS and Science Act directs roughly US$52.7 billion to revive US semiconductor capacity, including about $39 billion for manufacturing incentives and $11 billion for R&D and workforce development.
These investments have already catalyzed more than $200 billion in announced private-sector fab projects across states such as Arizona, Texas and New York. Yet the US share of global chip manufacturing remains just 12%, down from 37% in 1990, and the country produces 0% of the world’s most advanced logic chips, defined as below 7 nanometers.
Beijing’s approach is coordinated and durable. China has organized its enormous state apparatus, universities, research labs and leading firms around a strategic objective: to dominate the next wave of computing and AI.
The government has allocated roughly $150 billion to semiconductor programs since 2014 and set a national AI goal of becoming the world’s primary innovation center by 2030.
China now awards about four times as many STEM bachelor’s degrees as the United States each year, produces nearly half of the world’s engineering PhDs and saw its patent office process 1,828,054 applications in 2024, part of a global total of roughly 3.7 million filings.
Chinese companies are building domestic lithography capacity, creating supply‑chain workarounds and training large AI models on clusters of locally produced accelerators. These are not isolated moves; they are coordinated, adequately funded and sustained.
The strategic stakes are straightforward. Technological leadership is not merely about market share or prestige. Leadership shapes economic growth, shapes rules governing emerging technologies and shapes the progress of nations and people.
If the US views this moment as a quick 100-meter race, it will lose the longer one. Fragmentary tariffs and blunt export bans may temporarily slow the activities of specific actors.
Still, they risk driving partners onto improper tracks and into alternative ecosystems, fragmenting supply chains, ceding standard-setting influence and ultimately losing the race.
What’s next? The correct response isn’t protectionism nor passivity. Instead, it requires a resilient, nationwide strategy that combines investment, alliances and smart regulation.
Conversely, a narrow focus on near-term manufacturing incentives — without rebuilding basic research, graduate training and forming talent and high-skilled professionals — will leave the US vulnerable as today’s hardware edge erodes.
America still spends more than 3% of GDP on total R&D, roughly 3.4-3.6% in recent years, but that broad strength masks a worrying trend. Federal R&D as a share of GDP has fallen from about 1.2% in the 1970s to roughly 0.7% today, even as China’s R&D intensity climbed to about 2.68% in 2024. Restoring public funding for basic research and infrastructure is essential for long-term leadership.
The right strategy requires a multiyear effort to increase federal R&D, expand engineering and computer science fellowships, fund university-industry partnerships to address long-term challenges and coordinate industrial policy.
A bipartisan National AI & Semiconductor Initiative should elevate multiyear basic research funding across agencies, establish a sustained fellowship program to replenish the talent pipeline and fund regional manufacturing and hubs linked to universities.
The US, Japan and the Netherlands collectively control over 90% of advanced lithography tools—a leverage point that works only with unified policy.
If the US treats this moment as a series of one-off measures, it risks watching China lead the most important technological breakthrough of the 21st century. But if Washington commits the resources, institutions and bipartisan support that built Apollo, America can still lead the next major era of innovation.
Bruno S. Sergi (PhD) is instructor of Sustainability and Global Development Practice Graduate Programs, DCE; a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Center for International Development; editor at Cambridge Elements in the Economics of Emerging Marketsand Entrepreneurship and Global Economic Growth; and associate editor at The American Economist.