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Degen crypto hunter with focus on #RWA, #DEPIN #AI #DEFI #Layer1 $NSDX $RNDR #FTM #RUNE

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

China didn’t conquer industries with guns. It conquered them with price.

Sony made the first commercial lithium-ion battery in 1991. Japan led for years. Germany and Japan dominated solar panels. Europe owned steel. The U.S. once controlled rare earths.

Today China produces ~70% of the world’s batteries, the overwhelming majority of solar panels, and processes the critical materials that power everything modern. None of those positions were taken by invasion. They were taken by a deliberate four-step playbook that keeps repeating:

1. The state designates a sector as strategic and floods it with cheap capital, land, power, and tax breaks.
2. Chinese firms sell at razor-thin margins or outright losses, prices no private Western company can match for long.
3. Competitors bleed, close factories, or exit.
4. Once the field is clear, China sets the prices, the standards, and the rules.

The real power isn’t just mining. It’s refining and processing. China extracts only ~8% of the world’s copper but refines nearly half. It holds under 7% of lithium reserves yet processes ~80%. Cobalt refining sits around 77%. Rare-earth processing is closer to 90%. Own the mine if you want; China owns the factory that turns the rock into usable input. Without that step, the resource is just dirt.

Recent moves show the endgame. Export controls on antimony, gallium, and germanium demonstrated how quickly the tap can be turned off and how quickly it can be turned back on during trade talks. Control the chokepoint and you control the leverage. China already leads refining for 19 of the 20 most critical minerals. That is not a sector story. That is the foundation of modern manufacturing.

The same logic is now being applied to AI: release capable models widely and cheaply, force competitors to match unsustainable economics, and compete on scale and iteration speed rather than pure frontier breakthroughs.

The uncomfortable part for the West is the response. After decades of preaching pure free markets and non-intervention, governments are taking equity stakes in strategic firms, Intel, rare-earth processors, and others. The playbook that was criticized is being adopted, just later and with far less institutional patience.

This is not magic or conspiracy. It is sustained industrial policy executed at continental scale against fragmented, quarterly-earnings-driven competitors. Cheap steel was the training ground. Batteries and solar were the intermediate targets. Critical minerals processing is the current high ground. AI is the next layer because it will sit underneath every other industry.

The strategy works until it doesn’t, overcapacity, debt, demographic pressure, and eventual quality/innovation gaps can erode it. But ignoring the pattern while it is still working is the more immediate risk. Cheap today can become expensive, or unavailable, the day the supplier decides the relationship has changed.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

The definition of human greed

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Unitree and Wang Xingxing are compressing decades of “someday” into hardware you can actually build and scale. Transformable form factors, pilot-capable cockpits, and aggressive cost curves aren’t just cool demos, they’re the practical steps toward machines that can handle the dirty, dangerous, or repetitive work humans shouldn’t have to.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Night-shift laundry is over.
ACE Robotics’ Xiaoxin collects, loads, washes, sorts & folds, in actual cramped hotel rooms.

Labor still burns 35–55% of hotel costs. This is where service robots start printing money.

The robots are already folding.😁

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

That hair isn’t fashion. It’s a father’s beacon.

While the world mocked the curls, Marc Cucurella wore them so his boy never loses sight of him.

Fame fades.
Trophies gather dust.
But a dad who refuses to disappear?
That’s the real win.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​😍

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

China doesn’t need better AI.
It just needs cheaper AI that is “good enough.”

Scott Galloway is right: this is classic dumping. Open-weight models at a fraction of the cost. CFOs will switch. Valuations will crack. And because so much of the recent GDP growth and S&P is riding on the AI CapEx boom, the ripple effects won’t stay contained.
We’ve already watched this playbook work on solar, steel, and semiconductors.

The market has no patriotism. Only price sensitivity.

The technology race was never the real race.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over the years is this:

Not every opinion deserves a response.
Not every battle deserves your energy.

The highest performers don’t win every argument.
They choose where to invest their attention.

Your time is finite.
Your focus is your greatest asset.

Protect both.

Sometimes, the smartest response isn’t having the last word.
It’s walking away and putting that energy into building something meaningful.

Choose progress over proving a point.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

🚨 My followers, this one’s for you.

If you’re in Kuala Lumpur on 30–31 July, I’d love to invite you personally to Ultra Web3 Fest 2026 (@ultraweb3fest), one of the region’s biggest gatherings focused on AI & Web3.

As a co-organizer, I’m excited to welcome an incredible lineup of international and local speakers, founders, investors, innovators, and industry leaders who will be sharing what’s next in AI, blockchain, digital assets, tokenization, and the future of technology.

🎟 I’d like to offer my followers a FREE ticket.

Simply register using my exclusive invitation code:

ALVINFOO

⚠️ Free ticket redemptions are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the allocation is fully redeemed, the offer ends, so don’t wait!

👉 Register: https://t.co/xhORAJiGGk

🌐 Learn more: https://t.co/udzrecuOz7

If you’re serious about staying ahead of the AI and Web3 revolution, this is where you need to be.

If you’re coming, drop a 🚀 in the comments or send me a DM, I’d love to meet you in person.

See you in Kuala Lumpur!

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Just returned from WAIC 2026 in Shanghai.

One thing became crystal clear.

Most people in the West are looking at the AI race through the wrong lens.

They see:

• OpenAI vs DeepSeek
• Nvidia vs Huawei
• US vs China

That’s not what I saw.

China isn’t trying to win the chatbot race.

It’s trying to build the world’s largest AI-powered economy.

That changes everything.

Some observations from the ground:

→ AI is moving beyond demos into real industrial deployment.

Factories, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, education and government dominated the conversation, not consumer chatbots.

→ Compute sovereignty is no longer optional.

China is investing across the entire AI stack, chips, networking, cloud infrastructure and software optimization, not simply because it’s faster, but because strategic independence matters.

→ Robotics has crossed an important threshold.

This year’s focus wasn’t robots dancing.

It was robots working.

Factories.
Warehouses.
Hotels.
Industrial inspection.
Real production environments.

Deployment matters more than demonstrations.

→ The ecosystem is much broader than many realise.

Everyone knows DeepSeek.

But also watch:

• Qwen
• Kimi
• GLM
• MiniMax
• Baichuan

China now has multiple world-class AI companies competing aggressively across different layers of the stack.

Competition creates speed.

→ China also wants to influence AI governance.

Technology is only part of the strategy.

Standards.
Rules.
International collaboration.

Countries that help shape global AI governance may influence AI adoption just as much as those building frontier models.

My biggest takeaway?

The AI race is no longer just about building smarter models.

It’s about building better infrastructure.

Better deployment.

Better ecosystems.

And ultimately…

A larger AI-powered economy.

The companies that create the most economic value, not necessarily the highest benchmark scores, will define the next decade.

That’s the signal I believe many people outside China are still underestimating.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

In 1984, Red Bull was born from a chance encounter.

While battling jetlag, Dietrich Mateschitz discovered Krating Daeng, a popular drink among Thai truck drivers created by Chaleo Yoovidhya.

It was an affordable alternative to coffee.

Mateschitz saw potential in the beverage and convinced Yoovidhya if they made it carbonated they could transform it into a global brand.

Together, they invested $500,000 each, forming a 49/49 partnership, with 2% going to Yoovidhya’s son.

Initially, Red Bull struggled, losing over a million dollars in its early years. But Mateschitz didn’t give up.

Almost out of money, Mateschitz turned to his college friend Johannes Kastner, who owned an ad agency. Kastner’s team designed the now-iconic blue-and-silver can and coined the slogan “It Gives You Wings.”

They launched the re-brand in Hungary, Germany, and the UK.

Red Bull’s sales skyrocketed.

“It’s not just about the drink; it’s about the spirit,” Mateschitz said.

In 2022, when Mateschitz passed, his net worth was estimated at US$27.4 billion, underscoring the incredible success of Red Bull under his leadership.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

This is what happened when you focus on innovation, Chinese made EVs are next level!

They used to have a crap auto making industry 20 years ago, today the rest of the world is taking cue from them.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Love seeing @elonmusk simply reply ‘True’ to Jensen Huang’s take: American companies should absolutely use top Chinese open-source AI models like Kimi K3. No unfounded backdoor fears, just download and innovate.

Elon backing this even when it amps up competition for xAI shows real confidence in merit and truth over protectionism. Open competition accelerates progress for everyone.

The best ideas win when talent flows freely across borders. Stifling access to models slows humanity’s AI journey. Let’s build faster by embracing the best tools, wherever they come from.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Speak AI’s Language. Get Better Results.

Most people think all AI models think the same way.

They don’t.

Every leading AI model is trained on different datasets, different languages, and different optimization techniques. While they can communicate in many languages, each has a “native comfort zone” where it performs with greater efficiency.

That means:
✅ Better reasoning
✅ More accurate responses
✅ Lower token usage
✅ Faster outputs
✅ Better value for every prompt

For example:
• GPT models are highly optimized for English.
• DeepSeek, Qwen and GLM perform most efficiently in Chinese.
• Mistral has strong multilingual capabilities rooted in European languages.

This doesn’t mean you must use a model’s preferred language. It means that for complex reasoning, coding, analysis, or large-scale AI workflows, using the language a model understands most deeply can often improve quality while reducing unnecessary token costs.

The lesson?

Don’t just learn prompting.

Learn how your AI thinks.

The best AI users don’t simply ask better questions, they ask them in the language that gives the model the greatest advantage.

As AI becomes your executive assistant, strategist, marketer and researcher, understanding these nuances becomes a competitive edge.

Small optimization.
Big performance gains.

At 10xme, we’re helping executives build AI systems that work smarter, not harder.

Free AI Diagnostic + Weekly Executive AI Newsletter
📍 https://t.co/I4zR8aXpsx

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

When automation goes wrong 😂

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Mark is right to flag the hype-driven capex and long power contracts, efficiency gains, bigger models, better inference could ease demand faster than expected short-term.

But long-term wise, AI appetite is exploding across agents, robotics, science. Smart money hedges both ways. Overbuild possible; underbuild would be worse for progress.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

China’s AI models are dramatically cheaper right now, that’s real pressure on US labs.

But “Washington despises China” misses the point. This is exactly how competition is supposed to work: it forces better, faster, cheaper systems for everyone.

The winners won’t be the ones who complain the loudest or lobby the hardest, they’ll be the ones who ship superior models at lower cost. Global AI progress benefits from this race, not from trying to slow it down.

Focus on building. The universe won’t wait.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Nearly 200 leading Silicon Valley companies, including trailblazers like Y Combinator and Proton, have come together to champion open innovation: they’re urging the Trump administration to keep access to Chinese open-weight AI models wide open.

This is a powerful endorsement from the world’s most dynamic startup community, emphasizing that the smartest path forward is fueling American ingenuity, accelerating breakthroughs, and staying decisively ahead through competition and creativity, rather than relying solely on sanctions.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Chinese models are powering ~60% of token usage by US companies on OpenRouter.

The shift isn’t subtle, from US dominance to China leading on cost and volume in just 18 months.

This is exactly how competition is supposed to work. Cheaper, open-weight models from DeepSeek, Qwen & co. are winning the workloads that don’t need the absolute frontier. Great for builders shipping fast and keeping costs sane.

But price alone doesn’t win forever. The real edge goes to teams that combine efficiency with superior reasoning, reliability, and iteration speed.

Markets reward truth over hype!

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Spot on, but the real story is deeper. Elite Chinese researchers trained at CMU/Stanford are returning home to found Moonshot, DeepSeek, etc., because visa friction, H-1B limbo, and suspicion make staying feel risky, while China offers capital, speed, and national momentum.

America’s AI edge was built on attracting global talent. Turning that spigot even slightly risks accelerating exactly what export controls try to slow: China mastering efficient, open-weight models that punch way above their chip weight class.

Lesson: Talent is mobile and allergic to hassle. The winning strategy isn’t more walls, it’s making the US the clearest, fastest place on Earth for the world’s best engineers to build. Open pathways beat closed doors. Execution beats restrictions.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

It means someone believes in your ability to deliver.
It means you’re trusted with responsibility.
It means you matter.

Don’t run from pressure, rise to it.