I think China has plenty of data as well, of its own people at least. It's a surveillance state, and the big corps work closely with the government and so also the universities. My point is more that they have a chance of winning the ML race, but that doesn't matter if there will be more important technological breakthroughs in other areas that will have greater impact on AI than ML.

China does want to gather data, it has deployed tons of sensors and cameras to monitor its population's habits on the street. With the personal credit score implemented it can monitor its population even more thoroughly. How much data it gathers on its population thanks to the Great Firewall we can only speculate.

Granted, population data is one thing since you can incentivize people to share it. Data gathering that requires investment of money into sensors and time for careful placement of them is a completely different thing entirely

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