More than half of seasoned market investors surveyed anticipate that within a five-year window, leadership in artificial intelligence will no longer rest with any single nation, with the United States and China converging toward a shared position at the top of the field.
The research draws from a poll of 100 senior investors spanning pension funds, insurance asset managers, family offices, and wealth managers with a combined $513 billion under management, carried out on behalf of London-headquartered thematic equity firm Robocap. Participants were sourced from eight territories: the UK, US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, and Switzerland. Data collection took place through an online survey administered by the independent research firm Pureprofile during May 2026.
When respondents were asked about the AI landscape five years out, more than half pointed to a shared position at the top for the US and China, whereas roughly one in three believed the US would hold that ground on its own. A mere one in fifty respondents took the view that China would fully displace the United States at the top. About one in twelve survey participants — eight per cent of the total — anticipated that leadership would fall to a third country or regional grouping, a pattern that points toward rising confidence in investment activity across the Gulf and South-East Asia.
Among those who allocate capital on behalf of institutions, a broadly shared assessment holds that China has narrowed the gap in particular areas — patent filings, the output of research-trained graduates, and certain applied robotics segments. Market positioning among surveyed investors points toward a gradual narrowing of the gap that the US has long held in private capital allocation, cutting-edge model development, and advanced chip design, even as that lead, for now, remains intact across all three areas.
Robocap's founder and chief investment officer, Jonathan Cohen, argued that while the United States has held a commanding position in artificial intelligence development, a growing body of professional investors now views that lead as unlikely to last.
Surveyed participants uniformly anticipated that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia would advance toward their stated goals of establishing themselves as internationally recognised centres for AI research and data infrastructure, with roughly three in five rating those prospects as likely to prove highly successful — a finding that reflects a broader shift in investor attention away from any single dominant market toward opportunities distributed across multiple regions.
Near-unanimity defined the survey results on the UK, with 99% of those polled forecasting expansion in the UK AI sector — ranked third by value at present — across the coming half-decade, while just over a quarter of respondents foresaw a steep upward trajectory. Respondents' views on AI regulation in the UK and the European Union were not uniform, with roughly a third holding their position with particular conviction, though the survey captured only a slice of opinion rather than a settled consensus.
Binding requirements for high-risk AI systems took effect across the EU under a staged rollout spanning 2024 and 2025, whereas the approach adopted in the UK rests on broad principles and lets individual sectors take the lead — an arrangement that some investors view as placing constraints on development, even though it carries fewer formal mandates than the continental model.
Three in five survey participants placed AI sovereignty above constraints on energy output when ranking national energy policy priorities, while the remaining two in five backed the approach centred on curbing energy production for climate purposes.
Gulf-based sovereign wealth funds and pension vehicles are channelling capital into artificial intelligence infrastructure on a considerable scale, while a number of Asian economies have moved to build out homegrown model capabilities partly in response to restrictions placed by the United States on exports of advanced semiconductor technology. How far those patterns will actually close the gap with the US over the next five years is the question that shapes how portfolios get built, according to the survey findings.
