even if datacenters aren't good for the communities there are in, it would be much worse if China advances in AI faster.

this is one of the core flaws in democracy, while the popularity contest generally curbs blatant abuse (also note how even that fails miserably when the electorate groups start to hate each other), the vast majority of people have no real way to judge the impacts of non-trivial decisions and judgement doesn't even need to come with certainty, just knowing which risks are worth it. voters will never get it right.

and in the information age, democratic sabotage is many times easier than informing a public that in most cases has no interest in being informed when the group think/herd instincts are triggered.

i suspect democracy only worked well thus far because it was never truly real. media was always concentrated and there were no non-democratic peers. this is no longer the case. when the media was concentrated democracy was just an emergent properly of media dynamics. now it's chaotic and subject to external targeted perturbation.

I think China "advancing" faster is better. Hoarding some magic numbers on a hard drive isn't a sound business plan, and shouldn't be what we're betting the farm (literally) on.