28 July 2025, 07:02 | Updated: 28 July 2025, 08:59

By Dominic Davies

Last week, US President Donald Trump unveiled his ‘AI Action Plan’. It focused on deregulation, infrastructure investment to build data centres and meet energy demands, and the relaxation of export rules to make it easier to sell A.I. hardware and software abroad.

It follows Keir Starmer’s similarly titled ‘A.I. Opportunities Action Plan’ which, among other things, will create dozens of so-called ‘A.I. Growth Zones’.

Planning laws will be bypassed in the name of massive data centre construction (one of which will be the biggest in Europe). The EU is moving in a similar direction with its A.I. Continent Action Plan.

All of these efforts are aligned around the rhetoric of ‘winning the A.I. race’ (the plan unveiled by the White House last week was explicitly named as such). But why does there even need to be an A.I. race? Why can’t the world just cooperate on these future-defining technologies?

The answer lies in how China has behaved when it comes to this kind of........

© LBC