HAS PRESIDENT Donald Trump been good for American innovation? But Mr Trump has also attacked the country’s leading universities , restricted high-skilled immigration and cut funding to public institutions that support research.
His administration has championed cutting-edge industries such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence (“Whoever wins AI, WINS!”). It has presided over an unprecedented data-centre boom, ensuring that the country has more available “compute” than any other. Academics complain of a “war on science” .
And the Genius Act, passed last year, set the regulatory foundation for stablecoins, digital currencies linked to the dollar.
America currently has the largest number of deep-science startups: 12,752, of which about half (54%) are still in the early stage of development. Its contingent of 3,466 in 2025 is more than twice as big as it was five years before. Uncle Sam is also facing tough competition at the frontier of innovation. But China’s total is growing fast. It will also concern many policymakers and industrialists in America, who have woken up to the geopolitical importance of the world not yet eaten by software technologies.
Last year saw an uptick in “deep-science” entrepreneurship, which refers to capital-intensive companies working on physical technological advances in the non-digital world. That growth will please China’s government, which has signalled a strong preference for deep-tech firms over their “softer” consumer-facing rivals.
