6.3 Asia — The New Center of Gravity

The New Center of Gravity: How Asia became the beating heart of global artificial intelligenceIn May 2023, a Chinese company named DeepSeek was founded. Less than two years later, its models rivaled those of OpenAI — at a fraction of the cost.The world was surprised. It should not have been.China had one million six hundred seventy thousand AI-related companies. It was filing seventy percent of global AI patents. Taiwan was manufacturing ninety percent of the planet's advanced chips — the "silicon shield" that makes the island indispensable. India had become the world leader in AI skills penetration.Morris Chang invented TSMC in 1987 after being "put out to pasture" at Texas Instruments at fifty-four. Fei-Fei Li, born in China, had created ImageNet — the database that launched the deep learning revolution.Parallel paths are converging. The center of gravity is tipping. Asia is no longer the periphery of global innovation — it is becoming its heart.