Sovereign AI, Open Source, and the Gulf’s Big Bet with Interconnected Kevin Xu

Every panel on AI and geopolitics seems to default to the same cliché: “the US–China race.” In this episode of Differential Understanding, I wanted to sit with someone who has actually lived inside DC, Silicon Valley, and the US–China tech corridor, and ask whether that framing still makes sense.

My guest is Kevin Xu, founder of Interconnected Capital – a global hedge fund focused on the picks and shovels of AI – and author of the Interconnected newsletter, which sits at the intersection of tech, business, and geopolitics. Kevin’s path runs from Obama campaign staffer and White House / Commerce Department comms to GitHub’s international expansion lead, and now to full-time investor–writer with a very explicit geopolitical lens.

We start with why he insists on “thinking in public” as an investor, and why he believes ideas soulocking in a vault. From there, we dive into his critique of the “race” narrative and his alternative concept of US–China co-opetition – a messy mix of competition, cooperation, and outright co-opting of each other’s models and research. That leads naturally into China’s open-source AI ecosystem, the Manus–Meta deal, and what he would need to see before feeling comfortable owning the upcoming MiniMax and Zhipu IPOs in Hong Kong.

In the second half, we zoom out to sovereign AI: why South Korea might be one of the few countries outside the US and China with a shot at true full-stack AI sovereignty; how to read OpenAI’s Stargate initiative as an explicit American export play; and why the Gulf – particularly the UAE – is emerging as an AI “swing vote”, combining abundant energy, sovereign wealth, and a 1.5 million-strong construction workforce into a potential global compute hub. We close with Kevin’s differentiated view on China: AI diffusion is far more visible there, but the economic impact is not necessarily greater, and Beijing may end up being the first government forced to confront AI’s social implications.

In today’s world, there’s no shortage of information. Knowledge is abundant, perspectives are everywhere. But true insight doesn’t come from access alone—it comes from differentiated understanding. It’s the ability to piece together scattered signals, cut through the noise and clutter, and form a clear, original perspective on a situation, a trend, a business, or a person. That’s what makes understanding powerful.

Every episode, I bring in a guest with a unique point of view on a critical matter, phenomenon, or business trend—someone who can help us see things differently.

For more information on the podcast series, see here.

Timestamps (chapters):

* 00:57 – From DC to GitHub to Interconnected Capital

* 02:39 – Why Kevin “thinks in public” and writes Interconnected

* 04:44 – US–China AI is not a “race”: co-opetition explained

* 09:27 – Open-source / open-weight AI as last bastion of global cooperation

* 12:14 – Capital flows, decoupling and why “capital finds a way”

* 15:36 – Manus x Meta: product quality, viral growth, rationality in AI

* 19:40 – MiniMax & Zhipu IPOs: revenue reality vs AI lab hype

* 24:39 – Can Chinese labs win the Global South with cheaper AI?

* 27:09 – Sovereign AI 101 and why South Korea looks uniquely powerful

* 32:03 – Stargate as de-facto US sovereign AI and export strategy

* 34:44 – Kevin’s trip to UAE: Gulf AI strategies and the “swing vote” thesis

* 40:06 – Sovereign funds, MGX, and attracting talent from Hong Kong & beyond

* 44:18 – Non-consensus bet: UAE Stargate as a global compute hub

* 46:57 – Differentiated views on China AI diffusion and economic impact

* 51:29 – Embodied AI, “aunties pressing elevator buttons” and social risk

* 55:01 – Robotaxis, delivery drivers, and why China may go slower than expected

AI-generated transcript

Grace Shao (00:00)Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Differential Understanding. This is your host, Grace Shao And joining me today is Kevin Xu

Kevin Xu is the founder of Interconnected Capital, a global hedge fund focused on the picks and shovels of AI. He writes the Interconnected newsletter on SubSac, which covers tech, business, and geopolitics.

His insights have been frequently cited by the New York Times, Bloomberg, Economist, CNBC Information, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, among many other media outlets. He previously worked as a senior executive at GitHub, the world’s largest developer platform, and served in the White House and Commerce Department during the Obama administration. He studied international relations at Brown University and law and computer science at Stanford.

Grace Shao (00:40) Hey Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today. I already introduced you, but for listeners who may not know you that well, can you introduce yourself, the different hats you wear today, running Interconnected Capital, writing Interconnected Newsletter, and operating at the intersection of US, Asia, tech, geopolitics, and investing.

Kevin Xu (00:57) Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me. So as you mentioned, what I do currently during the day is I write the interconnected newsletter on the intersections of geopolitics, technology, and business. I also run my own long only fund called Interconnected Capital, focused on the picks and shovels of AI, both hardware and software. Prior to that, I actually work as an operator inside multiple Silicon Valley tech startups. The most recent one is GitHub, which is the Microsoft-owned developer

platform. I was their lead for international expansion strategy. That was my most recent real job, if you will. I also spent a bunch of time at different startups of varying sizes. And before that, actually started my career in politics. So I joined the first Obama administration’s campaign back in 2008. I was a campaign staffer. That was my first job out of college and then moved with the campaign team to DC, ⁓ worked in a few different roles.

in the Commerce Department as well as the White House doing mostly press and communications work. So that is ⁓ my sort of all over the place background that led me to what I’m doing today, which is investing and writing ⁓ in technology, but with a very heavy geopolitical lens to the process.

Grace Shao (02:13) I think that’s really interesting and explains to why you have a geopolitical lens, given that you actually have a DC background, right? But you run a fund and you actually keep most of your thinking, public, So instead of just keeping it mostly all private, which is what most investors do, why do you publish a very opinionated, very insightful sub stack and, share it very, I think generously with the public?

What kind of conversation gap are you trying to fill when you start the interconnected newsletter?

Kevin Xu (02:39) I think there are two elements to that. First is that this is more of my Silicon Valley ethos, which is that no idea is that worth keeping in secret. It’s all about the execution. Like I’m not, I didn’t come from a Wall Street finance background, right? Where a proprietary trading algorithm or some secret information you got from a meeting is this big trade secret that you want to lock into a vault inside Goldman Sachs or whatever. And that’s going to make you billions of dollars. That is not my approach to investing.

I think thinking in public, sharing in public, and really getting the feedback that I get from writing is much more valuable than keeping all these thoughts in my head as if they’re the next best thing since sliced bread. When you actually write it down, when you put it out into the internet, half of them are good, half of them are actually crap. And I use writing and writing in public specifically basically as a canvas for me

to think better, to hold my thoughts more clearly. I think knowing how to think is the most important skill for any investor to be able to succeed for the long term. And if any idea that I shared out there benefits somebody else, and you made some money off of it for free, so be it. Good for you that you actually understood some of the value from the writing, even perhap…

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