Bologna became a very prosperous city in the 12th century thanks to a combination of strategic location, dynamic trade, a thriving artisan and merchant class, and the founding, in 1088, of Europe’s first university which sparked intellectual, legal, and scientific innovation, drawing elites from all over Europe.
To display their excessive prosperity and rival each other’s influence, wealthy families frantically built towers across the city, about a hundred of them. Their costly construction reflected a rivalry for architectural supremacy between powerful noble families, with the towers’ size and visibility serving as tangible markers of status and influence in medieval Europe.
Bologna was dubbed the “city of towers” for this reason. Actually, some now call it the medieval Manhattan.
Medieval Bologna, full of towers, as imagined by modern engraver Toni Pecoraro (b. 1958, Agrigento, Sicily).
The construction of the towers was quite tedious and expensive, often requiring several years of work. Construction quality varied and several towers were subsequently demolished for security reasons.
Today, few towers remain. Two are particularly famous, the Asinelli Tower (97 metres (318.2 ft)) and the Garisenda Tower (48 metres (157.5 ft)).
Bologna is also famous for its porticoes. In 1288, the city decreed that all new houses had to be built with a portico, while those already existing that did not have one were required to add it.
The porticoes shielded people from intense heat and heavy rain, allowing daily life, commerce, and travel to continue comfortably regardless of the weather.
No other city in the world has as many porticoes as Bologna: all together, they cover more than 38 kilometres (24 mi) only in the historic centre, but can reach up to 53 kilometres (33 mi) if those outside the medieval city walls are also considered.
Walking around the city, one is almost always under porticoes, an early form of protectionism.
People are protected but that makes them oblivious to what’s going on outside. It’s only when crossing streets that one gets a fleeting sense of the outside world, seeing the sun, feeling the rain or the cold, ditching cars, trucks, buses and bicycles.
Arriving on Via Rizzoli, the two towers pop up. Spectacular, but truly ugly. They were obviously built hurriedly, in a costly race towards supremacy. The taller and faster, the better. One wonders how much architectural know-how was involved. How solid are the foundations? Actually, both towers are leaning, one even more than the Pisa tower.
It struck me that these towers are metaphors of the current race to AI supremacy, the frenetic building of LLMs and data centers, with little, if any, planning and safeguarding. Money blindly pouring from everywhere, with only a few luminaries begging for porticoes to shield us from some kind of Armageddon.
In less than a year, trillions of dollars have been pledged to buy chips to be housed in data centers where AI could play its magic to make the world smarter and healthier.
Just a few wealthy players are involved in this gigantic and world-defining endeavour:
ASML, a Dutch company, produces the photolithography machines used in the production of integrated circuits (chips), called “scanners”. It is the only producer in the world of EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) machines that can make the most advanced chips for AI. ASML has been barred from selling its EUVs to China.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) uses ASML machines to fabricate chips designed by others. It is subject to strict export controls and restrictions to China, especially for advanced semiconductors.
NVIDIA is the most prominent and sophisticated chip supplier in the world. Its most advanced chips are being bought by just about every non-Chinese AI company.
OpenAi, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic and a few others install these chips in data centers built to process AI data using their proprietary, closed (except Meta’s Llama), Large Language Models.
Other companies (e.g. Oracle) also build data centers (and buy chips) to process AI applications.
These few companies are defining how AI will rule our daily lives, on-the-go, without much planning or governmental supervision.
Also without any proven stable business models.
The US government, eager to maintain America’s apparent supremacy, lets these various towers go up quickly and haphazardly, even erecting various types of porticoes to shield them from Chinese competition.
Unlike the US, China has been planning for this AI moment for several years. It has gradually built up its power supply infrastructure, favoring natural gas, hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear power. China has plenty of cheap energy for its AI needs.
It has also fostered tech education, from elementary to engineering, and innovation (scientists, entrepreneurs) with top down planning and organized implementation.
Western porticoes such as import restrictions have resulted in Chinese companies finding ways and means to compete in this AI race, resulting in several Chinese LLMs and applications efficiently rivaling Western models at much lower costs.
More significantly, China embraced open-source standards, making their AI products freely available for anyone to use and adapt. China is flooding the global market with these free platforms, while Western companies charge $20-200 a month for access to their top-tier, closed models.
China has its own AI towers but it is a mix of large firms (e.g. Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and TikTok owner Bytedance) and many rising stars such as Zhipu, MiniMax and Moonshot, building on open models. China’s ecosystem appears to be strategically erected on solid foundations while requiring far less money.
It is also filling technological gaps as quickly as possible. Huawei is quickly ramping up advanced chip production while other companies are quietly working hard to achieve ASML’s capabilities.
It’s only a matter of time.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and visionary, has argued that China, home to half of the world’s AI developers, is rapidly increasing production of semiconductors. “China is nanoseconds behind America in AI,” he said recently.
Importantly, while Western companies are focused on achieving Artificial General Intelligence, China is busy building and implementing practical low cost AI business and consumer applications.
DeepSeek surprised the world in early 2025 but this week we learned that Chinese agentic AI models, practical AI for businesses and for you and me, are as efficient and significantly cheaper than Western models.
In late October, Shanghai-based AI startup MiniMax launched M2, a new open-source large language model developed primarily for coding and AI agents. In a post on X, MiniMax noted that the price of M2 is just 8% of that of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model. That’s 92% cheaper! (M2 costs $1.20 per a million output tokens, compared with $15 for Claude Sonnet, according to both companies.)
This means that companies using Chinese AI applications in robotics, autonomous vehicles, military and other applications, will have a meaningful cost advantage allowing for high market shares and better profit margins in such crucial domains.
Western companies are tripping over themselves to build more and bigger data centers, secure power supply and order chips while financial intermediaries oblige the frenzy with their own “creative” financing models.
Without proven business models that can withstand innovation and much lower prices. There are no sustainable porticoes against that.
Equity investors, many having a rather incomplete understanding of what’s going on, pile on the bandwagons with their own FOMO frenzy.
Perhaps, Bologna’s city counsellors ordered porticoes everywhere actually to protect citizens in case some towers frenetically erected by egotistic filthy rich families eventually crumbled.
The towers have almost all disappeared. Two, ugly, leaning and useless towers sorely remain in Bologna’s historic centre. Eight centuries later, the porticoes are still there, solid, beautiful and still very useful … against the weather.