The authors of the paper highlighted today have taken a look at the three cutting edge technologies which are, and will continue, shaping our world i.e. AI, quantum computing and semiconductors, to see where the world’s largest economic blocs rank in terms of progress.
They’ve hand-cranked, with the help of an LLM, a look at patents filed from 2019 to 2023 and that ‘hand-cranking’ is necessary to identify work which is truly unique.
This approach also requires them to preface their work with some some caveats: innovators may often not want to file patents (Coca-Cola never has), Chinese progress may be veiled due to sanctions threats and sometimes it’s little things that really matter which their sample ignores.
Analysts and the very curious can review the paper in detail via this link Which Companies are Ahead in Frontier Innovation on Critical Technologies? which calls out by name the various companies and institutions making a difference (in China Huawei and Ping An feature prominently for example).
The broad conclusions are as follows:
- The U.S. dominates in the fields of quantum computing and AI
2. China is out in front when it comes to semiconductors
3. Europe lags in all three sectors but draws level with China in terms of quantum computing.
4. Companies dominate U.S. contributions (particularly IBM, Intel and Microsoft), companies and research centers contribute equally to China’s tally and Europe’s work is coming mostly from widely dispersed (making commercialization harder) research entities.
Back to an earlier point, the researchers note in closing how some entities appear and then suddenly disappear in China’s filings fueling the notion that an element of hide and seek has become necessary there in response to sanctions from time to time imposed.
China may be publicly unhappy with the notion of a G-2 world, but work such as this underscores the in-plain-sight reality of our world as it is.
Happy Sunday
[Recommended citation: García-Herrero, A., M. Krystyanczuk and R. Schindowski (2025) ‘Which companies are ahead in frontier innovation on critical technologies? Comparing China, the European Union and the United States’, Working Paper 08/2025, Bruegel]