The artificial intelligence race has kept the world watching in rapt attention. Will the People's Republic of China beat the United States of America? If so, what are the implications? Kai-fu Lee, a former executive at Apple, SGI, Microsoft, and Google, argues in his novel AI Superpowers that China will outpace America in terms of AI development thanks to abundant data, eager entrepreneurs, well-educated and trained scientists, and a supportive policy landscape. However, the debate must be reframed: it's not a battle between the United States and China, but it instead appears to be a tug-of-war between seven technology companies--Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft on the American team and Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent on the Chinese side.

The artificial intelligence race has kept the world watching in rapt attention. Will the People's Republic of China beat the United States of America? If so, what are the implications? Kai-fu Lee, a former executive at Apple, SGI, Microsoft, and Google, argues in his novel AI Superpowers that China will outpace America in terms of AI development thanks to abundant data, eager entrepreneurs, well-educated and trained scientists, and a supportive policy landscape. However, the debate must be reframed: it's not a battle between the United States and China, but it instead appears to be a tug-of-war between seven technology companies--Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft on the American team and Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent on the Chinese side.

NVIDIA (NVDA) is already the clear leader in the artificial intelligence chip segment, and the company scored yet another win by getting International Business Machines (IBM) to use its NVIDIA Tesla P100 Pascal GPUs through NVIDIA NVLink. Last week IBM revealed a series of Linux-based servers which, according to the company, deliver higher levels of performance and greater computing efficiency than any other x86 based server. IBM has been steadily building its cognitive division, and its analytics segment alone is now nearing 5 billion in quarterly revenues. Since the decision to put Watson at the center of things the company has been expanding its AI capabilities, and the decision to use NVIDIA's products clearly underscores the lead NVIDIA has created in this segment. "The open and collaborative model of the OpenPOWER Foundation has propelled system innovation forward in a major way with the launch of the IBM Power System S822LC for High Performance Computing," said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA.