China and the United States may be competing for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, but some Chinese manufacturers see the construction of American data centers as an opportunity.
“We see very big potential in the US market,” said SK Lee, global vice president of Brightray, a Singapore-registered AI infrastructure company. “The Chinese market is just as big, but we can see that there is stronger demand in the United States”
Brightray’s only manufacturer is Chinese company PrefabDC, which makes prefabricated data centers. Brightray manages the construction of buildouts.
Even with growing public backlash to the construction of AI data centers, the United States has more AI data centers than any other country, with 5,427 in 2025, according to data released by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. China had 449, according to the same report.
American tech giants like Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta And Amazon It is estimated that they will spend around $765 billion this year on AI infrastructure. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently said that figure could reach $1 trillion next year.
Chinese companies like Alibaba committed much less. But the Chinese government has announced plans to invest $295 billion in data center construction over the next five years, although that is still far from U.S. private sector investment.
“Chinese companies just aren’t generating as much revenue from their AI services,” said Jeffrey Ding, an AI expert and assistant professor at George Washington University. “And that’s one of the reasons they’re not able to invest in these huge data center builds that their competitors are doing in the United States.”
Ding said the deeper problem is “there’s not as much demand for AI services.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump arrive for a military review in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, September 24, 2026.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington has put renewed emphasis on the Sino-U.S. trade dynamic, and AI has played an important role in discussions between Xi and President Donald Trump.
But relations between the rivals remain tense.
U.S. policymakers and the security establishment fear cybersecurity risks and worry that the United States could become dependent on China for critical infrastructure, which could give leverage to its main AI competitor. The Trump administration is considering banning Chinese open-weight AI models as well as new types of Chinese components from data centers.
“It’s a very challenging environment between the recent geopolitics, between the tariffs we’ve seen and the recent bans,” said Benjamin Boucher, senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “I think it will just depend on what we see politically in the coming years in terms of developments.”
Boucher explained that the United States, which faces shortages of key components such as electrical equipment, does not have much of what it needs domestically. And even if the United States has certain components, delivery times are long and China “can offer them at a much more favorable time”.
“China currently plays a very important role in the U.S. data center supply chain,” Boucher said.
China, the world’s largest manufacturer, is already deeply embedded in the U.S. supply chain, and has been for years. Chinese companies supply transformers, batteries and fiber optic cables, among other products.
At a factory in China’s eastern trading city of Yangzhou, Brightray’s Lee explained how it benefits from China’s vast supply chain.
“These materials and equipment come from different parts of the world and a very large part comes from China because the Chinese supply chain is very integrated and complete. That’s the reason why we have the factory here in China,” Lee said.
Prefab construction is used in the United States, but primarily for modules inside a building rather than modules that include the exterior of the building, as Brightray says. The method allows a company to build the majority of the data center in a controlled environment to protect against bad weather and unexpected events at a site.
In the United States, data center construction takes an average of two to three years, industry analysts told CNBC. Brightray said its prefabricated data centers with PrefabDC can cut construction time by at least half.
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