China Maps AI Dominance in $70B Five-Year Plan
China's National People's Congress opens this week with a 15th Five-Year Plan that puts $70 billion in semiconductor subsidies and AI-plus manufacturing at the center of its tech race with the West.
Daniel Okafor
AI Industry & Policy Reporter
Daniel is a tech reporter who covers the business side of artificial intelligence - funding rounds, corporate strategy, regulatory battles, and the power dynamics between the labs racing to build frontier models. Before joining Awesome Agents, he spent four years at Reuters covering the intersection of technology and finance, with a particular focus on how venture capital shapes the AI industry.
He holds a degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and a postgraduate diploma in Journalism from City, University of London. His economics training shows in his reporting: he follows the money, reads the filings, and is skeptical of growth narratives that do not come with numbers attached.
At Awesome Agents, Daniel covers AI industry news with an emphasis on deals, policy, competition, and market dynamics. He is especially interested in the geopolitics of AI - export controls, chip restrictions, and the US-China-EU regulatory landscape. His reporting tends to focus on who benefits, who pays, and what the incentives actually are.
Based in London, UK.
Articles by Daniel Okafor
Qwen 3.5 Small Series Ships Four Models From 0.8B to 9B
Alibaba completes the Qwen 3.5 lineup with four small models - 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B - all natively multimodal, 262K context, Apache 2.0. The 9B outperforms last-gen Qwen3-30B and beats GPT-5-Nano on vision benchmarks.
Huawei Takes Atlas 950 Global to Challenge Nvidia
Huawei debuts its Atlas 950 SuperPoD at MWC Barcelona - 8,192 NPUs delivering 8 ExaFLOPS - marking its first overseas showcase of the AI supercomputer that directly targets Nvidia's cluster dominance.
AI Is Writing Code at the Pace of 40,000 Developers - And Doubling Fast
Claude Code alone now authors 4% of all GitHub commits. At its current growth rate, AI code output will match 200,000 developers by year-end, a million by 2027, and over a billion by 2028.
Musk Called Grok Safer Than ChatGPT - Records Disagree
Elon Musk's deposition claims that Grok is safer than ChatGPT are undercut by xAI's own deepfake scandal and mounting regulatory scrutiny ahead of the April trial.
DeepSeek V4 Drops Next Week - 1 Trillion Parameters on Chinese Chips
DeepSeek will release V4, a natively multimodal trillion-parameter model with a 1M token context window, in the first week of March - optimized for Huawei Ascend chips, not Nvidia.
Anthropic Sues Pentagon Over Supply Chain Blacklist
Anthropic will challenge the Pentagon's unprecedented supply chain risk designation in court, calling it legally unsound and a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government.
Bezos Eyes Tens of Billions to Remake Manufacturing With AI
Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is raising tens of billions through a manufacturing transformation vehicle to acquire industrial companies and rebuild them with AI.
AI Now Swallows 61% of All Venture Capital - OECD Report Shows a Market Devouring Itself
An OECD report reveals AI firms captured 61% of global venture capital in 2025 at $258.7 billion, doubling their share since 2022, while mega-deals above $1 billion account for half of all investment value.
CoreWeave Crashes 19% After Earnings Reveal a $35 Billion Spending Gamble
CoreWeave stock plunged nearly 19% after Q4 earnings revealed widening losses, an 894% debt-to-equity ratio, and plans to spend up to $35 billion on data center expansion in 2026.
Rubio Orders U.S. Diplomats to Lobby Against Foreign Data Sovereignty Laws - Citing AI and Cloud Risks
A State Department cable signed by Secretary Rubio directs U.S. embassies worldwide to oppose data localization mandates, calling the EU's GDPR 'unnecessarily burdensome' and framing unrestricted cross-border data flows as critical AI infrastructure.
DeepSeek Locks Nvidia and AMD Out of V4 - Gives Huawei a Head Start
DeepSeek has denied Nvidia and AMD pre-release access to its upcoming V4 model while granting Huawei and domestic Chinese chipmakers a multi-week optimization window, signaling a strategic pivot toward building a parallel AI software ecosystem on Chinese silicon.
