> China wants the US economy to flounder

It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly.

It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM models.

They can't do this at the same margins. Cloud compute traditionally has <= 30% margins, and that's the very generous profit margin that folks like AWS are able to squeeze out of it with lock-in and proprietary tooling (something that will probably go away as software becomes more commoditized.) Frontier model companies (e.g., SpaceX) have been promising profit margins in the 75%+ range.