America and China are often described as competitors in artificial intelligence.
That description is increasingly incomplete.
The real competition is much bigger.
It is about who builds the technologies, factories, supply chains, infrastructure and standards that the rest of the world will depend on.
AI is only one battlefield.
China is simultaneously building enormous positions in electric vehicles, batteries, solar power, drones, shipbuilding, satellites, energy storage and other strategic technologies.
Steve Feldstein's new book, Bytes and Bullets, makes essentially this argument: technological power is becoming inseparable from geopolitical and military power, while China's rise is extending well beyond artificial intelligence.
And the numbers are difficult to dismiss.
In 2025, China produced about 70% of the world's electric cars, more than 80% of battery cells, around 85% of cathode active material and more than 90% of anode active material, according to the International Energy Agency.
China also retains more than 80% of global solar-PV module manufacturing capacity and around 95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.
In shipbuilding, Chinese yards accounted for 56.1% of global output and 69% of new orders in 2025.
And China is rapidly expanding its space-launch and satellite capabilities.
This isn't one technology.
It is an ecosystem.
America is looking at the chip.
China is building the factory.
This is the strategic distinction that gets lost in the AI debate.
Washington has spent enormous political capital restricting China's access to advanced semiconductors.
That makes sense.
Advanced chips are strategically important.
But semiconductors are only one layer of technological power.
Imagine a future battlefield.
You need:
AI.
Drones.
Satellites.
Communications.
Batteries.
Electric vehicles.
Robotics.
Energy storage.
Sensors.
Ships.
Solar power.
Industrial machinery.
Rare minerals.
Data centres.
The country that controls more of that stack does not necessarily need to have the single best AI model.
It may possess something more valuable:
the ability to manufacture the physical world in which AI operates.
That is China's advantage.
The solar industry is the clearest example
China did not invent solar power.
But it became extraordinarily good at manufacturing it cheaply.
The IEA says China accounts for more than 80% of global solar-module manufacturing capacity and about 95% of wafer capacity.
And this dominance is not simply the result of one clever company.
It is an industrial ecosystem involving:
polysilicon;
wafers;
cells;
modules;
inverters;
equipment;
engineering;
logistics;
finance;
domestic demand.
The result is scale.
And scale produces cheaper products.
And cheaper products produce more global demand.
That creates even more scale.
This is how technological dominance can become self-reinforcing.
China didn't just build EVs.
It built the battery economy underneath them.
This may be even more important.
The IEA estimates that China accounted for more than 80% of global battery-cell production in 2025.
But battery dominance goes deeper.
China also dominates critical intermediate components.
That means an American or European company can manufacture an electric vehicle without necessarily controlling the most important technology inside it.
The battery is not just another component.
It determines:
range;
cost;
charging;
vehicle weight;
performance;
and increasingly the economics of mass adoption.
So whoever controls battery manufacturing has enormous influence over the future of transportation.
And China has built that position before many Western governments fully appreciated what was happening.
Then there are the drones
Ukraine demonstrated something that should have permanently changed military thinking.
Modern warfare does not require every weapon to cost millions of dollars.
Sometimes thousands of cheap drones are more strategically useful than a handful of extraordinarily expensive platforms.
China sits at the centre of the global commercial drone ecosystem.
That matters because commercial drone technology can increasingly overlap with military applications.
Cameras.
Motors.
Batteries.
Navigation.
Communications.
Sensors.
Manufacturing.
Software.
Artificial intelligence.
These technologies do not always have a clean civilian/military boundary.
And that is precisely why the distinction between an industrial policy and a defence policy is becoming increasingly blurred.
China is also becoming a shipbuilding superpower
This might be one of the least appreciated parts of the story.
China's shipbuilding dominance is enormous.
In 2025, Chinese shipyards accounted for 56.1% of global shipbuilding output.
They captured 69% of new orders.
Their orderbook represented 66.8% of the global total.
This matters because commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding share infrastructure, engineers, suppliers, steel, propulsion expertise and manufacturing capacity.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has argued that China's commercial shipbuilding advantage also strengthens its naval-industrial base because many commercial yards possess dual-use capabilities.
This is where technology becomes geopolitics.
A country doesn't need every factory to be military.
It needs an industrial ecosystem capable of producing military hardware at scale when required.
China has built precisely that kind of industrial depth.
And then comes space
China's space programme is another example of why looking only at AI is misleading.
The U.S.-China space competition increasingly involves:
launch vehicles;
reusable rockets;
satellite constellations;
communications;
Earth observation;
navigation;
remote sensing;
and military space capabilities.
China conducted 77 orbital launch attempts by November 30, 2025, already exceeding its previous annual record of 68.
It had placed 322 satellites into orbit by then.
China is also developing large satellite constellations intended to compete in the same strategic space increasingly occupied by Starlink.
This isn't merely about putting satellites into orbit.
It is about building an independent technological infrastructure above the planet.
And whoever controls that infrastructure controls communications, intelligence, navigation and increasingly the battlefield itself.
The U.S. still has enormous advantages
This is not an argument that China has surpassed America across technology.
It hasn't.
The United States remains extraordinarily powerful in:
advanced semiconductor design;
leading AI models;
software;
cloud computing;
venture capital;
biotechnology;
aerospace;
universities;
research;
global finance;
and some of the world's most valuable technology companies.
America also retains powerful alliances and enormous military capabilities.
The mistake would be to confuse those strengths with permanent dominance.
Technological leadership is not a trophy.
It is an industrial process.
And industrial processes can move.
China's secret weapon isn't necessarily government control.
It's scale.
There is a tendency in Washington to describe Chinese technological progress as if everything is simply the result of government subsidies.
That explanation is incomplete.
Government policy matters enormously.
But China's advantage also comes from something less ideological:
scale.
China has an enormous domestic market.
It has dense manufacturing clusters.
It has huge industrial supply chains.
It has engineering talent.
It has ports.
It has logistics infrastructure.
It has large numbers of suppliers operating close to one another.
It can manufacture components, assemble products and export them through an integrated industrial ecosystem.
The IEA has found China to be the lowest-cost producer across many clean-energy technologies, with manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Europe often substantially more expensive to build.
That creates an uncomfortable problem for Western policymakers.
You cannot tariff your way into industrial competence overnight.
The West helped create the problem
For decades, Western consumers benefited enormously from globalization.
Cheap Chinese manufacturing meant:
cheaper electronics;
cheaper solar panels;
cheaper batteries;
cheaper consumer goods;
cheaper machinery.
Western companies could focus on design, finance, software and high-value services while manufacturing moved elsewhere.
That looked efficient.
Until geopolitics changed.
Now Washington and Brussels are discovering that efficiency and resilience are not the same thing.
A supply chain optimized for the cheapest possible production may be strategically vulnerable.
China learned how to manufacture.
The West became extremely good at optimizing financial returns.
Both strategies produced wealth.
But they produced different forms of power.
This is why tariffs alone won't solve the problem
America can impose tariffs.
Europe can impose tariffs.
The United States can restrict Chinese technology.
Export controls can slow China's access to advanced chips.
Investment screening can prevent certain transfers.
All of these tools can be legitimate.
But they do not automatically create competing industries.
If the objective is technological independence, the harder question is:
Where are the factories?
Where are the workers?
Where are the suppliers?
Where are the engineers?
Where is the machinery?
Where is the raw material processing?
Where is the domestic market?
Where is the long-term capital?
Where is the infrastructure?
You cannot manufacture an industrial ecosystem with an executive order.
And this is where China's model becomes particularly interesting
China has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to sacrifice short-term efficiency for long-term industrial capacity.
Solar.
Batteries.
EVs.
High-speed rail.
Shipbuilding.
Telecommunications.
Renewable energy.
Electricity infrastructure.
The objective isn't necessarily to dominate every individual company.
It is to create an environment in which an entire sector becomes internationally competitive.
Once that happens, the geopolitical benefits follow.
Exports generate revenue.
Factories create skills.
Skills create innovation.
Innovation improves products.
Scale lowers prices.
Lower prices capture foreign markets.
Foreign dependence increases.
And dependence becomes leverage.
That is industrial power.
The rest of the world is caught in the middle
This is where the China-U.S. rivalry becomes particularly interesting for countries like Nigeria.
Nigeria does not need to choose between being “pro-China” or “pro-America.”
It needs to understand what each side actually controls.
China can offer:
solar panels;
batteries;
EVs;
telecommunications equipment;
drones;
manufacturing;
rail infrastructure;
industrial equipment.
The United States can offer:
advanced software;
AI;
financial infrastructure;
semiconductors;
aerospace;
research;
venture capital;
global technology platforms.
Europe offers other industrial and regulatory capabilities.
The strategic question for Africa should therefore be:
How do we stop being permanently dependent on somebody else's technological ecosystem?
Africa shouldn't simply become China's next market
This is the part African governments need to understand.
Chinese technological dominance can be beneficial.
Cheap solar panels can electrify communities.
Affordable EVs can reduce transportation costs.
Chinese batteries can accelerate energy storage.
Telecommunications equipment can connect millions of people.
Industrial machinery can help build factories.
These are opportunities.
But importing everything creates another dependency.
If Africa merely replaces dependence on Western technology with dependence on Chinese technology, it has not achieved technological sovereignty.
It has changed suppliers.
Sovereignty requires productive capacity.
Nigeria should be paying attention
Nigeria has enormous advantages.
A huge population.
A large consumer market.
Abundant renewable-energy potential.
Critical minerals.
Young engineers.
Entrepreneurs.
Universities.
A strategic position in Africa.
And access to the AfCFTA market.
But Nigeria repeatedly approaches technology as a procurement exercise.
Government needs something.
A foreign company supplies it.
The project is launched.
The minister takes photographs.
The foreign contractor leaves.
The country remains dependent.
That is not technology policy.
That is technology consumption.
The real opportunity is industrial learning
If Nigeria buys Chinese solar equipment, what does Nigeria learn?
If Nigeria imports Chinese electric buses, what percentage of the manufacturing process happens locally?
If Nigeria purchases drones, who develops the software?
If Nigeria deploys foreign telecom infrastructure, who controls the data?
If Nigeria buys batteries, where are they repaired?
If Nigeria imports electric vehicles, where are the battery packs serviced?
Where are the motors manufactured?
Where are the electronics assembled?
Where are the engineers trained?
Those questions matter more than the headline value of the contract.
Because technology transfer is not the same thing as technology purchase.
China understood something the West forgot
Industrial power has compounding effects.
A factory creates engineers.
Engineers create suppliers.
Suppliers create new companies.
Companies create exports.
Exports finance research.
Research creates better products.
Better products capture more markets.
And suddenly an industry that looked insignificant 20 years earlier becomes strategically indispensable.
China's clean-energy position demonstrates this perfectly.
The IEA expects China to remain the world's largest producer of solar technologies well into the next decade, even as India, the U.S. and others expand domestic capacity.
The important point is not that China will control everything forever.
It is that China has already built the capacity to influence the global transition.
The future war may be fought over factories before weapons
This is the central lesson of Bytes and Bullets.
Modern military power increasingly depends on civilian technology.
The drone factory can become a military supplier.
The battery factory can support military vehicles.
The satellite constellation can support intelligence.
The semiconductor plant can support weapons.
The shipyard can produce commercial vessels today and contribute to naval capacity tomorrow.
The AI company can develop civilian software and military systems using overlapping technologies.
The boundaries are disappearing.
And that means national security increasingly begins with industrial policy.
America shouldn't panic.
But it should stop assuming that AI alone determines technological leadership.
The U.S. could win the AI race and still lose important parts of the broader technology race.
Imagine America has the world's best AI model.
But China manufactures most of the batteries.
China produces most of the solar equipment.
China builds most of the ships.
China controls major parts of the battery supply chain.
China produces enormous quantities of drones.
China launches rapidly expanding satellite constellations.
Who possesses the broader industrial advantage?
That is the question Washington should be asking.
And there is an even bigger lesson
Technological power is no longer simply:
Who invented it?
It is:
Who can manufacture it?
Who can make it cheaply?
Who can scale it?
Who can supply the world?
Who controls the components?
Who sets the standards?
Who maintains the infrastructure?
Who can replace the imports if geopolitics breaks the supply chain?
That is a very different definition of technological leadership.
China is not merely trying to invent the future.
It is trying to manufacture it.
And that may prove more consequential than winning any single AI benchmark.
The United States still has extraordinary technological advantages.
But the era when technological supremacy could be measured by who had the fastest computer or the smartest software may be ending.
The next era will be decided by something much more physical:
factories, energy, minerals, batteries, ships, satellites, chips, drones and the industrial ecosystems connecting them.
China understands this.
America is waking up to it.
Africa should not wait another twenty years before it does the same.
Because the biggest geopolitical mistake Africa can make is not choosing the wrong side in the U.S.-China rivalry.
It is remaining a customer of both sides forever.
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