A decisive shift in global economic power is under way, driven by China’s industrial strategy focused on robots and AI. China’s accelerating technological self-sufficiency is a game changer, according to George Noble, former fund manager at Fidelity Overseas Fund.

“We’re watching the biggest shift in global economic power unfold in real time,” Noble said, arguing that while the US remains preoccupied with domestic political disputes and expansive fiscal programmes, Beijing has embarked on “the most AGGRESSIVE industrial strategy since the Marshall Plan”.

Artificial intelligence has become the most visible battleground.

“[In the week of the Chinese New Year] five Chinese AI companies — Zhipu, ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot, and DeepSeek — released or announced major model upgrades simultaneously during Spring Festival,” Noble said.

Citing a RAND report published last month, he noted that “Chinese AI models now run at one-sixth to one-fourth the cost of comparable American systems. One-sixth the cost.”

By contrast, surveys of US corporate adopters suggest limited near-term productivity gains.

“The vast majority of US companies investing in AI report ‘no change’ in productivity, decision-making, or customer satisfaction,” Noble said. “America is burning cash. China is building products.”

Semiconductors form a parallel front. The so-called “Four Dragons” — Moore Threads, MetaX, Biren and Enflame — have either gone public or filed for IPOs in recent months. Huawei, he said, is doubling output of its Ascend chip to 600,000 units this year and has set out a three-year roadmap to overtake Nvidia. Bernstein estimates that Nvidia’s China market share could fall from 40% to 8% under current export restrictions, while Huawei’s could rise to 50%.

“They’re not competing with our tech stack. They’re REPLACING IT,” Noble said, pointing to Beijing’s mobilisation of $70bn in chip incentives and plans to require state telecoms groups to replace AMD and Intel products by 2027.

Energy policy underpins the strategy. China invested $1 trillion in clean energy in 2025 — four times its spending on fossil fuels — with the sector accounting for more than one-third of GDP growth, Noble said. The country now produces a terawatt of solar panel capacity annually, accounts for over 70% of global EV production and sells nearly half of its new cars as electric. “They can power their AI data centres with cheap renewable energy they built themselves,” he added.

Monetary signals reinforce the shift. China’s central bank has purchased gold for 15 consecutive months, with January reserves reaching $369.6bn, up $51bn in a single month.

“They’re not just accumulating gold. They’re building the infrastructure to challenge how global commodities get priced,” Noble said, noting the expansion of renminbi-priced contracts on the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

The increase in gold reserves is running in parallel with an accelerating selloff of China’s treasury bill holdings. China’s holding of US treasuries has halved since its peak of $1.3 trillion in 2012 to around $600bn now. And the pace has accelerated since the US weaponised the dollar by barring Russia from using the greenback in the 2022 SWIFT sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine four years ago.

Trade flows have also been redirected as part of the remake of the global economy underway at the moment, driven by rising geopolitical global tensions. China’s total exports reached a record $3.77 trillion last year, producing a $1.19 trillion surplus, but within that the share of exports to the US fell 28.6%, shipments to Africa rose 27.5% and to ASEAN 8.2%. Goldman Sachs has raised its 2026 China growth forecast to 4.8%.

Add the components together — low-cost AI, a parallel chip ecosystem, $1tn a year in clean energy, sustained gold purchases and a trade surplus pivoted towards the Global South — and the trajectory is clear, Noble argued. “China is building the future. America is unfortunately just talking about it.”