From labs to listings: US-China AI race makes capital markets the new battleground

The US-China tech rivalry is no longer confined to the laboratories, fabs and boardrooms of the industry’s biggest names – the artificial intelligence battlefield has now expanded into the capital markets, where ambition is priced in real time.As Washington and Beijing push rival technology ecosystems, initial public offerings and listings are becoming a high-stakes referendum on who gets funding, credibility and, most of all, the runway to scale.Across the Pacific, the contest has been swelling the pipeline of technology floats, setting the stage for what deal makers expect could be a record-breaking year for tech listings.In the United States, investors are watching for potential debuts from some of the most closely followed private companies of the past decade, from OpenAI and Anthropic to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.Any listing by these companies would be a blockbuster, with fundraising potentially running into the tens of billions of dollars.In China, a growing roster of AI developers, chipmakers and “hard tech” firms are moving towards listings in Hong Kong and on the mainland, as Beijing doubles down on technological self-reliance.“Amid tighter investment rules and national-security concerns in the US, and China’s self-reliance ambitions, capital markets are now part of broader industrial and technological competition,” said Joel Cheung, Asia analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).