‘Stretched thin’: Alibaba’s Qwen chief explains why US export controls give America edge over China in AI

Senior executives from China’s leading artificial intelligence firms are openly acknowledging the growing structural gap between Chinese and US AI labs, pointing to computing power constraints and US export controls as decisive factors shaping the global race for next-generation models.  

Justin Lin, head of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen series of open-source large language models, has put the odds of any Chinese company leapfrogging leaders such as OpenAI or Anthropic through fundamental breakthroughs at less than 20% over the next three to five years, according to a Bloomberg report.  

Lin’s assessment reflects a broader sentiment within China’s AI ecosystem, with similar views reportedly shared by peers at Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Zhipu AI, one of the country’s most prominent LLM developers.  

Speaking during a panel discussion at the AGI-Next summit in Beijing, Lin highlighted how access to computing power — increasingly shaped by US export restrictions on advanced chips — has become a key differentiator between American and Chinese AI labs.  

“A massive amount of OpenAI’s compute is dedicated to next-generation research, whereas we are stretched thin — just meeting delivery demands consumes most of our resources,” Lin said at the event, which was co-organised by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua University, as reported by Bloomberg.  

The imbalance, he suggested, raises a fundamental question about innovation itself. “It’s an age-old question: does innovation happen in the hands of the rich, or the poor?” Lin added.  

US export controls have limited Chinese firms’ access to cutting-edge semiconductors, forcing many companies to prioritise commercial deployment and customer delivery over long-term foundational research. In contrast, US-based labs continue to channel vast amounts of compute into training frontier models and pursuing breakthroughs in reasoning, multimodality, and artificial general intelligence.  

The comments came amid a week of strong market activity for Chinese AI firms. Zhipu AI and Shanghai-based MiniMax Group collectively raised more than $1 billion through public market debuts. MiniMax shares more than doubled on their first day of trading, while Zhipu’s stock has climbed 36% since its debut a day earlier.  

Despite investor enthusiasm, Lin’s remarks underscore the tension between market momentum and research capacity. While Chinese AI companies are gaining capital and scaling products rapidly, executives warn that limited compute resources may cap their ability to pursue the kind of long-horizon research that has propelled US firms ahead.