Mỹ vẫn dẫn đầu công nghệ, đặc biệt ở AI nhưng Trung Quốc đang rút ngắn khoảng cách
Báo cáo ngày 5/6/2025 của Trung tâm Belfer (ĐH Harvard) cho thấy Mỹ vẫn dẫn đầu Trung Quốc trong các công nghệ trọng yếu: trí tuệ nhân tạo (AI), sinh học, bán dẫn, không gian và lượng tử.
Mỹ chiếm ưu thế nhờ đầu tư công – tư khổng lồ, hệ sinh thái đổi mới phi tập trung và lực lượng nghiên cứu đa dạng, trình độ cao.
Báo cáo khác với các bảng xếp hạng như Nature Index hay ASPI, vốn cho rằng Trung Quốc đang dẫn đầu trong nhiều lĩnh vực nhờ sản lượng nghiên cứu vượt trội.
Ví dụ: Đại học Tứ Xuyên đã vượt qua Stanford, MIT và Oxford trong xuất bản nghiên cứu chất lượng cao chỉ trong vòng chưa đầy 2 năm.
ASPI cho rằng Trung Quốc dẫn đầu 57/64 công nghệ trong giai đoạn 2019–2023.
Tuy nhiên, Harvard cho rằng các chỉ số này không phản ánh đượcquy mô đầu tư tài chính, năng lực triển khai thực tế và sức mạnh hạ tầng – những yếu tố Mỹ đang vượt trội.
Mỹ vẫn dẫn đầu về sức mạnh tính toán, thuật toán AI, số lượng vụ phóng không gian thành công, và vị trí trong các tổ chức quốc tế đặt chuẩn công nghệ.
Trung Quốc thu hẹp khoảng cách nhờ chính sách tập trung, nguồn lực kinh tế, và đội ngũ nhân lực lớn trong các lĩnh vực như sản xuất dược phẩm, cảm biến lượng tử và truyền thông lượng tử.
Trong lĩnh vực AI, Mỹ chiếm ưu thế về thuật toán và hạ tầng, nhưng Trung Quốc dẫn đầu về dữ liệu và nhân lực, với các mô hình như DeepSeek R1 (ngang ngửa OpenAI-o1) và Qwen3 của Alibaba (nguồn mở, hiệu quả chi phí).
Trung Quốc có thể vượt Mỹ trong công nghệ sinh học nhờ đầu tư công lớn và sản xuất quy mô lớn.
Về bán dẫn, dù phụ thuộc thiết bị nước ngoài, Trung Quốc vẫn có điểm kinh tế cao nhờ chương trìnhMade in China 2025 và phản ứng đối phó cấm vận công nghệ từ Mỹ.
Ở công nghệ lượng tử, nhân lực và nghiên cứu mạnh giúp Trung Quốc tiệm cận Mỹ, dù ứng dụng thực tế vẫn hạn chế.
Harvard cảnh báo Mỹ có thể mất vị thếnếu không đảo ngược chính sách gây bất ổn như cắt giảm ngân sách nghiên cứu, siết sinh viên quốc tế, và căng thẳng chính trị trong các trường đại học.
Mỹ và Trung Quốc vẫn là hai cường quốc duy nhất ở nhóm đầu, vượt xa các đối thủ thứ cấp như Nhật Bản, Hàn Quốc, Anh, Đức và Đài Loan.
Trong tương lai, cả hai nước sẽ tăng cường đầu tư để đặt chuẩn công nghệ toàn cầu, nhất là trong lĩnh vực AI, nơi người dẫn đầu sẽ có lợi thế chiến lược lâu dài.
📌 Báo cáo Harvard khẳng định Mỹ vẫn dẫn đầu cuộc đua công nghệ nhưng Trung Quốc đang rút ngắn khoảng cách nhanh chóng, đặc biệt ở AI, sinh học và lượng tử. Mỹ mạnh về đầu tư và hệ sinh thái đổi mới, trong khi Trung Quốc tận dụng quy mô, nhân lực và dữ liệu để tăng tốc. Cuộc đối đầu công nghệ ngày càng gay gắt và sẽ quyết định ai đặt ra chuẩn toàn cầu trong tương lai.
US still reigns over China in tech race, but gaps are quickly closing: Harvard report
Contrary to other global trackers, university’s tech race scorecard puts US in front in critical fields with China gaining from ‘research achievements, human capital’
The United States continued to lead China in critical technologies, namely artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, semiconductors, space and quantum, according to a report released on Thursday by Harvard University.
The authors of the Critical and Emerging Technologies Index, released by the university’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, said the US maintained its competitive edge because of large-scale American public and private investment, a top-notch and diverse research workforce, and a decades-old decentralised innovation ecosystem.
To quantify the global tech race, the index assigned considerable weight to private and public funding resources – a US advantage not captured by trackers focusing on research output, such as the Nature Index and the Critical Technology Tracker, created by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Both of these have pointed to China as the leading country in many research fields, according to the team.
In January, Nature Index showed that in terms of high-quality scientific research output, Sichuan University, a regional university in southwest China, had overtaken Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University and the University of Tokyo in less than two years.
The index – maintained by the highly regarded journal Nature – ranks institutions based on their contributions to articles published in the world’s most influential science journals.
This year the index also showed that China led the world in physics research publications along with Europe, with the US a distant rival.
According to the Australian think tank tracker, China led in 57 of 64 technologies from 2019 to 2023, which included the fields of defence, space, energy, environment, AI, biotech and quantum.
That tracker evaluated the risk of nations monopolising research in key technologies based on the share of high-impact research output and the number of leading institutions.
“Although both Europe and China are comparable to the US in raw GDP terms, Europe’s regulatory environment and the Chinese state’s extensive intervention in its markets prevent it either from achieving economic conditions similar to the US, with its uniquely deep capital markets, and favourable conditions for starting new businesses,” said Ethan Kessler, a researcher at the Belfer Centre and co-author of the latest report.
“There are also factors that we consider in our index, such as [the] number of successful space launches for the space category, where the US is ahead by a considerable margin. By comparison, in space-related publications, the global field is more even,” he added.
However, while China largely trailed the US in all key technology fields, it remained competitive and was steadily narrowing the gap, the report found.
“China lags in semiconductors and advanced AI due to reliance on foreign equipment, weaker early-stage private research, and shallower capital markets, but it is far closer to the United States in biotechnology and quantum, where its strengths lie in pharmaceutical production, quantum sensing and quantum communications,” the report said.
“Backed by economic resources, human capital and centralised planning, China is leveraging scale to reduce dependence on imports, attract innovation within its borders and boost industrial competitiveness,” the report added.
“Still, China remains constrained by large structural challenges: slowing growth, mounting debt, and industrial overcapacity, among others,” it noted.
The Belfer index evaluated each country’s performance by measuring factors such as private investments and public funding in actual amounts, the numbers and expertise of researchers, defensive capabilities relative to the technology, legal and policy structures, as well as leadership in international organisations and norm-setting bodies. Most of the data used was from 2023.
“China has made significant progress and enjoys unique advantages that will challenge the American AI lead in the next decade,” the report said in reference to AI.
According to the authors of the report, the US dominated in terms of economic resources, computing power and algorithms, while China led in data and human capital.
But the team said the US lead in AI “may be more vulnerable than previously assumed”, citing China’s recent releases of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which had performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across mathematics, code and reasoning tasks, as well as Alibaba’s Qwen3 family of highly ranked open-source models. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
“The great progress China has made in AI over the last two years, particularly with regard to model performance and cost-optimised training, underscores the importance of not only pioneering key technologies but also leveraging initial progress to advance growth in a variety of industries,” the report said.
“China has the most immediate opportunity to overtake the United States in biotechnology,” the report noted, because China had “dominance in pharmaceutical production through extensive, large-scale public investments and state-backed manufacturing”.
Aside from biotech, Kessler said China was also mostly a threat to US positions in the fields of semiconductors and quantum – areas in the index with the smallest gaps in raw scores between the two countries.
“In semiconductors, China’s high economic score indicates its extensive investments in its domestic semiconductor industry as part of the Made in China 2025 initiative and as part of its response to US export controls,” he said.
“Due to quantum’s nascent stage, China’s impressive human capital and research achievements mean much more in this category than in, for example, space, where real-world applications have existed for decades and the US has a substantial lead in part due to its longer history of space launches,” Kessler said.
The team also said the US “currently stands to lose talent and funding due to changing federal policy” and urged Washington to “reverse volatile actions on trade and end clashes with academic institutions”.
“Cuts to academic research funding and growing political polarisation are hindering the United States’ ability to strategically shape the public and private allocation of resources,” they wrote in the report.
US President Donald Trump has drastically cut research funding across numerous fields, including biomedicine, space and climate.
The administration has also ramped up attacks on leading universities, banning new Chinese and other foreign students at Harvard and threatening to strip Columbia of its academic accreditation over Gaza protests.
The report also found that the US and China were the foremost nations in key technologies, with a significant gap separating them from second-tier competitors, including Japan, South Korea, Britain, Germany and Taiwan.
“US and Chinese state investments in most or all of the covered technology areas will likely increase in the coming years, since a duopoly makes it increasingly valuable for the leading state in any single novel area of technology to set standards that lock in consumers across the globe,” Kessler said, pointing to AI as an example.
