China is using the steel playbook on AI — and America’s tech billionaires are standing in the blast zone

The pre-World War I era at the turn of the century coincided with a surge in modern industrial capitalism that transformed steel barons into America’s first billionaire class, while the new one is minting tech fortunes on a Carnegie- and Rockefeller-sized scale, with Elon Musk flirting with trillionaire status in recent months after the historic SpaceX IPO.

In both eras, the winners controlled the infrastructure layer — mines, mills and railroads then; chips, clouds, AI models and data now — and turned that control into extraordinary wealth, political influence and the ability to shape markets for everyone else.

But now, China lurks just offstage, preparing to bring the steel era’s industrial logic back into the story, using scale, subsidies and price pressure to test how durable today’s AI fortunes really are.

The first billionaire class

Steel did not just build bridges and skyscrapers. It built the first modern American billionaire class, with Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan at the center of a system that fused industrial growth, financial consolidation and enormous private power.

That power was double-edged: the steel men were celebrated as nation-builders and denounced as robber barons — and both were true. Their fortunes came from owning chokepoints, and those chokepoints let them influence labor, markets and policy in ways that still shape the country’s political vocabulary.

Today’s tech oligarchs are playing the same game with a different stack. Instead of blast furnaces and railroads, they own the cloud, the app ecosystem, the advertising machine and, increasingly, the AI layer that sits on top of all of it.

That makes them both fabulously wealthy and structurally embedded in the economy: AI is now driving capital spending, market valuations and the sense that the next era of growth will be software-defined. As in the Gilded Age, the uncomfortable truth is that the people building the future are also concentrating control over it.

China’s steel playbook

In July 2024, Susan Ariel Aaronson argued in Fortune that AI could become the “new steel” if governments overbuilt capacity and created a glut that eventually turned into dumping. By 2026, outside reporting suggested China was following the steel playbook exactly: backing industrial scale, favoring deployment over glamour, and pushing cheaper supply into the world market until competitors have to absorb the pressure. The Washington Examiner described China’s approach as a “TikTok playbook” for AI, while Bloomberg and The New York Times reported that Beijing’s goal is to expand global share, even if profits come later.

The steel analogy is increasingly less abstract. In steel, China’s scale and subsidies helped undercut rivals and reshape global pricing. In AI, Chinese labs such as DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen are being deployed as low-cost, widely available alternatives that can win users fast, squeeze margins and make it harder for U.S. firms to sustain premium pricing. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission describes China’s AI strategy as a familiar industrial playbook, now applied to open-source software, embodied AI and the wider industrial base.

In a May 2026 interview on The Diary of a CEO podcast, NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway described China’s tactic as “modern-day steel dumping.” He explained that China’s goal would be to push cheap AI into the U.S. market, force prices down, consolidate the market, and eventually gain margin power. He added, ominously, that America’s billionaire class is already preparing for the collapse of the AI boom.

Fortune’s own reporting showed the U.S.-China AI gap had nearly vanished by spring 2026, even as U.S. private investment remained far larger than China’s. That appears to be, in other words, the AI market repeating the old steel dynamic where America won the first-mover story but China eventually won on volume.

The consequence is not just another industrial rivalry. It is a fight over the sector minting today’s fortunes and the architecture of the next economy. If steel built America’s first billionaire class, AI is building its second — and China is using the same kind of industrial force that once crushed steel to see whether it can weaken the wealth machine at the center of the new Gilded Age.

That is why the comparison to steel barons matters: every dominant infrastructure era creates both extraordinary wealth and a target for disruption. In the late 19th century, the target was steel. In the 2020s, it is AI — and the men who stand to lose most are the ones who thought they were building the future, not inheriting the vulnerabilities of an earlier age.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.