A former Army Staff officer argues that the U.S. is misjudging the AI competition by focusing on chatbot benchmarks, while China is pursuing a broader "civilization-building project." The author states that China’s Huawei is preparing to double production of its Ascend processors in 2026, pushing toward 1.6 million chips, and Chinese developers at DeepSeek have tuned their newest models to run on that Huawei silicon. The piece introduces the concept of an "AI Power Stack," noting that the newest data centers can draw more than a gigawatt each, and that China now generates more than twice as much electric power as the United States. The author warns that Washington risks forgetting the historical lesson that great powers prevail when other nations build their militaries, economies, and futures around their systems, not merely by possessing the single best weapon.