The New AI Winners: Picks and Shovels

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We’re offering your first month of The Wire China for just one dollar. More details below!Move over, DeepSeek and Minimax. Investors are flocking to a new set of AI winners: the Chinese manufacturers making circuit boards and other components that keep the world’s AI models humming along. Subscribe nowIn this episode, reporters Rachel Cheung and Savannah Billman discuss the growing importance of these so-called ‘pick and shovel’ makers and where the money is flowing within China’s AI ecosystem. The AI industry is fraught with risk for developers and investors, but the manufacturers will win no matter which LLM comes out on top.ShareStart your subscription to The Wire China today! We’re making it easy with your first month for just one dollar. Sign up for our newsletter here and we’ll send you the discount code to apply at checkout.Discount CodeTranscriptSavannah: Hello, and welcome back to The Wire China podcast. I’m Savannah Billman, staff writer and podcast producer here at The Wire China, and will soon be joined by my fellow reporter, Rachel Cheung, to chat about the hardware manufacturers actually making money from AI in China.But first, it’s been a busy two weeks in the China journalism world. The whole lot of us have been swept up in the hubbub around the Trump-Xi summit. We’ve seen a flood of pre-summit op-eds, minute-by-minute coverage from reporters on the ground in Beijing, and now the post-summit evaluations are rolling in.This Sunday evening, we’ll throw our own hat in the ring. Our upcoming cover story will analyze what the summit did and didn’t mean, and where…