Is China Cooking Waymo?

China's AV companies are expanding globally and pushing to control the supply chain

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“China’s AV sector is performing strongly — controlling key parts of the supply chain, dominating international expansion, and scaling up deployment domestically.”

In terms of international expansion, Chinese firms are way ahead of the American competition. Chinese companies have worked out Autonomous Vehicle (AV) deployment deals with more than thirteen countries. The US: two. Chinese companies are also exporting something closer to a full autonomy stack — vehicles bundled with cloud services, AI traffic management systems, and road sensors.

There’s also the supply chain. Unlike frontier AI models, where US export controls on Hopper and Blackwell GPUs have genuinely constrained China’s progress, AVs operate in a different hardware regime. Here, the leverage between the US and China is more evenly matched, and in some cases, inverted.

Today’s Content:

1. AVs in the US and China

2. The International AV market

3. Who has leverage in the AV supply chain

At times, this piece reads like a typical “US vs China” article, but in fact we’re seeing more of a “co-opetition” dynamic Kevin Xu highlighted in the AI industry. In fact, the perhaps more interesting aspect is how the line between “Chinese AV company” and “US AV company” blurs in practice. Chinese AVs use NVIDIA chips, Waymo uses Chinese-made Zeekr vehicles, and Uber and Lyft partner with Chinese AV firms internationally, not to mention critical minerals. The industries are too tangled for neat distinctions… but let’s try to untangle them anyway.