Research Universities Will Determine Who Wins the Tech Marathon

Who will dominate the future of technology—China or the United States? The answer will not be found in today’s corporate battles, but in the hum of university laboratories where the breakthroughs of tomorrow are taking shape. While it is far less clear which country is ahead in today’s tech race than most Americans realize, there is even less recognition that we are in a marathon, not a sprint. This race is not just for tomorrow or the next decade, but for the entire century and beyond. 

While the world today fixates on DeepSeek versus OpenAI, the reality is that technological leadership in the coming decade and beyond will be determined not in corporate boardrooms or tech startups, but in university laboratories. 

Research universities will determine who wins the tech marathon. They produce the knowledge workers and experts essential for innovation. They are the breeding grounds for the breakthrough discoveries that power technological revolutions. They are places where researchers have the latitude to try and sometimes fail, understanding that failure often has the silver lining of advancing knowledge or taking research in unexpected but productive directions. While university researchers are accountable to funding agencies (often the federal government) as well as university leadership, they are not slaves to a corporate bottom line that inhibits the breakthrough discoveries only uncovered by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

Fundamental Research Propelled America to Innovation Leadership

The American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush laid the foundation for the innovation ecosystem that has propelled America to the technological edge it has long enjoyed. Universities and federal laboratories are at the heart of that ecosystem. 

Bush convinced President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress that only the federal government could take on the task of funding the long-term, high-risk fundamental research in universities that would unlock the groundbreaking technologies of tomorrow. 

Only the federal government has the patience and resources to invest at scale. This approach empowered universities to pursue ambitious, high-risk research that private industry lacked the capacity to absorb or the resources to undertake independently. The results have been staggering. Thousands of discoveries and innovations—ranging from the mundane (FM radio) to the crucial (satellite technology)—have emerged from research universities.

Federally Funded University Leadership Foundational to Today’s Technologies

The core breakthroughs behind the Internet, Google search, OpenAI's GPT models, and Tesla’s self-driving cars all trace back to university research in neural networks, deep learning, image recognition, and robotics, pioneered at universities such as Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Toronto. 

As President Emeritus of The University of Colorado, I must highlight that the Nobel Prize-winning research at its Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) has driven breakthroughs in quantum computing, precision measurement, and secure communication. 

Without decades of sustained, federally funded university research, the digital economy as we know it would not exist. 

Winning the tech marathon requires both fundamental and applied research, and America’s research universities remain key drivers of both.

The emergence of the Silicon Valley as the world’s premier tech hub was no accident. It blossomed due to the proximity of a major research universities—Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley—whose graduates and faculty fueled the rise of firms such as Hewlett-Packard, Google, and NVIDIA. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, developed their search engine while PhD students at Stanford. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, earned his electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University before moving on to Stanford and revolutionizing computing with graphics processing units (GPUs) that power today’s AI models. The University of Colorado has played a key role in aerospace innovation, producing 21 NASA astronauts and countless researchers responsible for major space exploration advancements to every planet in the solar system and beyond, including contributions to the Hubble Space Telescopes and Mars missions. The University of North Dakota, which I also led as President, has been a leader in uncrewed aerial vehicle research, pioneering developments that have shaped drone technology and autonomous flight systems. Each of the 187 “R1” research universities in the US has similar stories. 

Research universities are America’s crown jewels.

Continued Leadership Requires Not Just Research Funding, but also Compute Power

AI is the most visible disruptive technology today, but robotics, quantum computing, biotechnology, and materials science will also be central to shaping the future. The convergence of these technologies will redefine entire industries. Yet AI will play an outsized role in advancing all scientific fields as it accelerates research, enhances simulations, and uncovers new insights at a pace previously unimaginable. Unlocking these discoveries and supporting tomorrow’s entrepreneurs requires more than just federal research funding—it requires greater compute power (the term that describes the computational resources, fueled by advanced semiconductors, necessary for data processing and calculations).

Recently, Princeton University managed to buy 300 of NVIDIA’s most advanced AI chips, while Meta purchased 350,000. 

America’s research universities cannot continue to play their traditional roles in technological innovation without significantly greater access to compute power. 

This gap threatens to slow the development of fundamental discoveries that improve our lives, fuel industry-wide transformations and spawn startups that become the Metas of the future.

Data is Also Essential

Access to high-quality datasets is just as crucial as compute power. The federal government must ensure universities have access to large, diverse, and unbiased datasets to train AI models effectively. This includes facilitating data-sharing partnerships with tech giants while ensuring privacy and security standards are maintained if not strengthened. 

Universities should not be at a competitive disadvantage against private-sector AI labs that monopolize access to data.

China Following the Playbook That Fueled America’s Leadership

China has recognized that university research drives technological dominance and therefore is replicating America’s model—at scale. Over the past two decades, China has massively expanded its university system, with institutions such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Zhejiang University (Zhe Da) emerging as world-class research hubs. The Chinese government has poured billions into academic research, rapidly closing the gap with the US in R&D spending and AI talent. China assists its universities with massive compute infrastructure and data access, providing state-sponsored AI training resources to compete at scale. 

China now graduates nearly four times as many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students as the US. 

While having the best engineers leads to the most discoveries, having the most engineers allows faster application and scaling of new technologies. China aims to do both.

Zhejiang University has positioned itself as China’s answer to Stanford, fueling DeepSeek AI’s emergence as a formidable competitor to OpenAI. DeepSeek AI was founded by a Zhejiang University alumnus and has thrived within the university’s strong innovation ecosystem in Hangzhou—a city that has become China’s version of Silicon Valley. Just as Stanford played a pivotal role in shaping the US tech sector, Zhejiang University is becoming a powerhouse for AI research and commercialization. 

America’s University Leadership is Being Challenged

The days when the US had an uncontested monopoly on the world’s best universities are fading. While American institutions still dominate global rankings, China, Singapore, and other nations are closing the gap. The same is true in research funding. America was once the undisputed leader in R&D spending, but China is catching up fast. 

If current trends continue, China will soon surpass the US in total research funding.

This shift underscores the danger of leaving fundamental research solely in the hands of private companies. Corporations focus on the profit from commercializing applications, but those applications rest on foundational breakthroughs from university laboratories. Tomorrow’s technological commercialization will slow if today’s fundamental research is stifled.

The message is clear: America must love and care for its research universities. America throwing out its research baby with the bathwater of other issues would be to China’s advantage. 

Continued technological leadership—upon which economic prosperity and national security depend—will be determined by which nation best nurtures its research institutions. 

It is in university laboratories that the secrets of science are unlocked. The question is whether the US will continue to lead in discovery or allow others to be the front runners in the tech marathon.