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While US-based firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft still dominate the artificial intelligence space, Chinese counterparts like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are quickly catching up, and in some cases, surpassing their US competition. As a consequence, China appears to be on a path to reproduce its success in supercomputing in AI.

As should be apparent to anyone following this space, the technology duo of supercomputing and AI are not unrelated, the most recent example being the triumph of the Libratus poker-playing application over four of the best players in the game. Libratus’s software was developed at Carnegie Mellon University, but schooled at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center using the Bridges supercomputer. In fact, Libratus was tapping into Bridges at night during the poker tournament, refining its poker tactics, while the human players slept. In fact, all the technologies discussed below rely on some sort of HPC platform.

But while it’s relatively straightforward, although not necessarily easy, to build supercomputing systems, developing AI software requires more cutting-edge talents. And until a few years ago, much of that talent resided inside US-based companies and universities. No more. In fact, a US government report determined that the number of academic papers published in China that mentioned “deep learning” exceeds the number published by US researchers.