Pacific Money | Economy

Asia Is Sprinting on AI. Europe Is Still Tying Its Laces.

China, South Korea, Japan, India, and Singapore are all setting ambitious AI goals while the EU falls farther behind.

When China’s State Council issued its “AI Plus” guideline on August 26, 2025, it set a target no other major economy has dared to publish: a 90 percent penetration rate for new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents by 2030, with 70 percent already by 2027. The document framed AI as the next general-purpose technology, comparable to electricity, and identified six sectors where it must dominate: science and technology, industry, consumption, public well-being, governance, and global cooperation. 

By 2030, China expects AI to be a primary growth engine; by 2035, an “intelligent economy and society” sufficient to underpin what Xi Jinping calls socialist modernization. Trivium China’s analysis noted that no Chinese policy, including the 2025 guideline, defined a unit of measurement for AI’s contribution to GDP, but the political signal is clear: AI is now in the same tier as the 2015 “Internet Plus” initiative that produced Meituan, DiDi, and the cashless economy. Beijing is willing to legislate AI adoption, not just subsidize it.

The implication for Europe, which is still debating compliance, is unflattering. And China is not the only Asian country powering up to embrace AI. 

South Korea has gone furthest in formalizing its approach. The Framework Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence, known as the AI Basic Act, took effect on January 22, 2026, making South Korea the first country to have a comprehensive AI statute that combines governance, industrial policy, and risk management into a single law. 

The 2026 national budget tripled AI spending to 10.1 trillion won (about $6.94 billion), and President Lee Jae-myung has pledged to make South Korea an “AI G3” power by 2030. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang announced in October 2025 that 260,000 Blackwell GPUs will be deployed across Samsung, SK, Hyundai, Naver, and government infrastructure. South Korea has chosen a path that the EU recognizes (regulate first) but paired it with capital deployment that the EU has not matched.

Japan presents the most interesting contrast. Generative AI usage among the Japanese public stood at 26.7 percent in 2024, compared with 68.8 percent in the United States and 81.2 percent in China, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ 2025 White Paper. The Japan Times reported in December 2025 that Tokyo’s draft basic AI program targets a public utilization rate of 50 percent, eventually 80 percent, alongside roughly 1 trillion yen (about $6.4 billion) in private R&D investment. NTT alone is committing $59 billion through 2027, and SoftBank has tied itself to OpenAI’s Stargate project with over $40 billion in commitments. Japan is late and knows it – now Tokyo is buying its way back.

India is running a different play: compute as a public utility. The IndiaAI Mission, approved in March 2024 with an outlay of over 103.7 million rupees ($1.24 billion) outlay, has already deployed over 38,000 GPUs (including 1,050 Google Trillium TPUs), well over the initial target of 10,000. Startups and academics can access H100-class compute at 65 rupees (about $0.72) per hour, the cheapest subsidized rate in the........

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