About Interconnected

Interconnected

Interconnected is an English-language bilingual newsletter on technology, business and geopolitics, written by Kevin Xu, with a strong focus on the United States and China. Published weekly in English and Chinese — on Substack as Interconnected and in bilingual form at interconnected.blog — it examines what Xu calls the Venn diagram of builders, operators, investors and regulators, and how they are all interconnected. Xu, who founded Interconnected Capital, a long-only global technology hedge fund focused on the infrastructure — the 'picks and shovels' — of artificial intelligence, started the newsletter in February 2020 and has written it for more than five years. His route to it ran through the Obama presidential campaign, the White House and the US Department of Commerce, Stanford law and computer science courses, the open-source database company PingCAP, early-stage investing with OSS Capital, and a senior role leading international expansion at GitHub. That unusual combination — Washington, Silicon Valley, open source and China — is the newsletter's defining asset, and its analysis has been cited by the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, CNBC, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, among many others. In this directory Interconnected is filed under Beijing as the nominal city for foreign-based China-watch outlets, following the precedent of earlier batches; Xu himself is based in the United States, and the newsletter is a US-published China-watch title, a distinction this profile keeps explicit.

Founder: Kevin Xu's three phases

Xu has described his own past in three phases, in a re-introduction published in the newsletter itself. He moved from China to Canada as a child, went to high school in California, and studied International Relations at Brown University, dreaming of becoming a diplomat. After graduation he stumbled, in his own telling, into working on Barack Obama's first presidential campaign — still, he says, probably the best job he has ever had — and then spent a few years in the Obama administration in Washington, DC, working for both the Commerce Department and the White House on press and communications. The second phase was technical and legal: law school at Stanford, where he took all the graduate-level computer science courses he could, naming CS107 Computer Systems as a favourite, and toyed with building a chatbot for health insurance. He then joined PingCAP, the company behind the open-source distributed database TiDB, to build out its team outside China and expand into different markets — Opensource.com lists him as PingCAP's General Manager of Global Strategy and Operations — travelling widely to developer meetups and conferences. The third phase joined investing to writing: early-stage investing on his own and with OSS Capital, where he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence; the launch of Interconnected in February 2020; public-market investing in companies overlapping his earlier phases; and, around 2021, joining GitHub — the world's largest developer platform, owned by Microsoft — to lead its global expansion. He has since founded Interconnected Capital and works as a full-time investor-writer, while stressing that the newsletter's opinions are his own and do not reflect the views of his previous employers: the White House, the US Department of Commerce, PingCAP, OSS Capital or GitHub/Microsoft.

Origins and format

Interconnected began in February 2020, before Xu's GitHub chapter, as a personal platform for thinking in public about the intersections his career had exposed him to. For its first three years it was published as a bilingual website at interconnected.blog; the newsletter then moved onto Substack, where it continues as a weekly publication, with the bilingual version maintained on the standalone site. The About page describes it as a weekly, bilingual (English/Chinese) publication looking at the Venn diagram of builders, operators, investors and regulators. Alongside the free weekly writing there is Interconnected Premium, a paid annual membership edition, whose advertised topics have included annual 'picks and shovels' investment surveys of the software industry and analyses of events such as China's investigation of Nvidia. The bilingual format is itself an editorial statement: Xu writes for readers on both sides of the Pacific, in both languages, about industries — cloud computing, semiconductors, open source, electric vehicles and AI — in which the two sides are simultaneously competitors, customers and collaborators. Few China-focused newsletters are genuinely bilingual and written by a single author who has worked inside both a US administration and a Chinese-founded technology company; that is the gap Interconnected was built to fill.

Editorial territory: technology, business, geopolitics

The newsletter's beat is the overlap its name promises. Recurring subjects, documented across its archive and in the podcast and press profiles of its author, include China's cloud services landscape and its competitive dynamics; semiconductor development and the export-control regime around it, from TSMC to Nvidia's Blackwell chips; Chinese open source, on which Xu has written a self-described definitive history tracing projects from TiDB (founded in 2015, and by 2018, he notes, considered good enough to replace Oracle in China) to OceanBase, Gitee and the open-weight AI models of the DeepSeek era; electric vehicles; and, increasingly, artificial intelligence infrastructure — the data centres, models, chips and energy that Xu's fund calls picks and shovels. A China Tech Investor podcast appearance on China's cloud landscape, in which Xu discussed cloud competition alongside TSMC and semiconductor rivalry, is an early example of the format: an operator-investor explaining Chinese technology industries to an English-speaking audience with the policy context attached, rather than as pure company news. The newsletter treats geopolitics not as background colour but as a first-order business variable — export controls, entity lists, investigations and summit diplomacy move the industries it covers, and its analysis is built to price that in.

From 'race' to 'co-opetition'

Interconnected's best-known conceptual contribution is Xu's rejection of the 'US-China AI race' framing in favour of 'co-opetition'. In an essay titled 'From Race to Co-opetition', published after more than five years of writing the newsletter, Xu argued that he had been 'inadequate and outright lazy' in repeatedly calling the US-China AI dynamic a race — a metaphor implying a finish line that does not exist and a zero-sum dynamic that does more harm than good. Going forward, he wrote, he would use 'co-opetition' — competition, cooperation and co-opting combined — as the shorthand for what is actually happening. He grounded the claim in evidence: a Center for Security and Emerging Technology report finding that between 2022 and 2024, 12 percent of the AI academic papers examined were produced by collaboration between researchers in the US and China, alongside the cross-border flow of open-source and open-weight models. He was equally candid about incentives, noting that bloodthirsty zero-sum metaphors win attention and subscriptions, and that he did not expect mainstream media or bigger newsletters to change. The essay matters beyond one newsletter's house style because it states, from inside the investor community, the analytical position Interconnected's coverage embodies: that US and Chinese technology ecosystems remain deeply entangled even amid strategic rivalry, and that coverage which assumes total decoupling will systematically misread both.

Voice in the wider conversation: podcasts and citations

Interconnected's influence runs substantially through citation and conversation. Its About page lists citations or republication in the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, CNBC, the Washington Post, The Information, Business Insider, the Financial Times, Wired, Al Jazeera, the Wall Street Journal, Protocol, TechCrunch, Noema Magazine, The New Statesman, Rest of World and the South China Morning Post. Xu is a frequent podcast guest on China and technology programmes: discussing DeepSeek's hiring culture and China's open-source route to foreign users; joining ChinaTalk's Jordan Schneider on AI rivalry and export controls; analysing sovereign AI with the Differential Understanding podcast, including South Korea's full-stack prospects, OpenAI's Stargate as an American export play, and the Gulf states' emergence as an AI 'swing vote' with energy, sovereign wealth and construction capacity; and joining live post-summit analysis of Trump-Xi meetings. Takshashila Institution researchers, in a 2026 discussion document on why China gives away its AI models, cited Xu's 2023 analysis of open source as a 'defensive business lever' that can render competitors 'moatless' — the same logic he applied to Meta's open-sourcing of Llama — as part of the strategic debate. A newsletter that is quoted in policy papers, parsed on specialist podcasts and cited by the financial press occupies a different niche from a news service: it is an interpretive authority, and its authority rests on the author's combined policy, operator and investor experience.

Interconnected Capital and the investor-writer model

Interconnected cannot be separated from Interconnected Capital, the long-only global technology hedge fund Xu founded, focused on AI infrastructure. Xu describes his day job as running the fund and writing the newsletter, 'thinking in public' as an investor — publishing the research and reasoning behind his view of industries in which he also invests. That model has clear strengths: the writing is informed by position-level research, company meetings and the discipline of being wrong at a cost; and Xu's 'picks and shovels' framing — favouring the suppliers of infrastructure over the most hyped application names — gives the newsletter a consistent investment lens, visible in pieces such as his annual software picks-and-shovels survey. It also requires the disclosures Xu provides: the About page states plainly that all opinions are his own, not his former employers', and readers are left in no doubt that the author is a market participant, not a disinterested reporter. In the taxonomy of China-watch media, Interconnected therefore belongs with the analyst-investor newsletters — closer to a public research note than to journalism — and should be cited as expert commentary with a declared standpoint, which is how the major outlets that quote it generally treat it.

Open source as a specialism

If one subject is Interconnected's home ground, it is open source in China. Xu came to it professionally at PingCAP, leading go-to-market, community and growth outside China for TiDB, and personally as an early writer on a topic he notes few in the tech or policy world were watching five years ago: what Chinese developers were doing on GitHub, which communities were emerging from Chinese tech giants and start-ups, and why Beijing's tone on open source shifted from ambivalence and occasional hostility to full embrace as part of national innovation and soft-power strategy. His later 'Chinese Open Source: A Definitive History' pulled that thread through the funded-start-up era of TiDB and Kyligence, Ant's OceanBase (spun out in 2020, open-sourced in 2021), the anointing of Gitee as a national champion platform, and the arrival of open-weight AI. The specialism has kept him in demand beyond the newsletter: when the AI agent project OpenClaw drew sponsorship interest in China, Xu — identified as GitHub's former head of internationalisation and Interconnected Capital's founder — was the intermediary reporting that Kaiyuanshe, China's largest non-governmental open-source community, and Ant's Ling lab were willing to sponsor or supply maintainers, while voicing his own concern that Chinese adoption should mean contribution, not just consumption. That is the newsletter's network effect in action: the writer is a node in the ecosystem he covers.

Audience and standing

Interconnected's audience is the professional China-technology readership: investors, technology executives, policy staff, journalists and researchers who need Chinese technology industries explained by someone fluent in both Washington and the open-source world, in English and Chinese. Its standing is best measured by the company its citations keep — the leading US and British business titles — and by its longevity: a one-author newsletter sustained weekly for more than five years, through a move from a standalone bilingual blog to Substack, a premium tier, and the founding of a fund alongside it. Xu's own anniversary reflection framed the first five-plus years as 'dissecting and exploring the Venn diagrams of technology, business, and geopolitics'; the co-opetition essay then publicly revised the framework, an unusually transparent piece of intellectual housekeeping that itself became a reference point in debates about how to describe US-China technology relations. For directory purposes, the essentials are these: Interconnected, founded February 2020, written by Kevin Xu, published weekly and bilingually at interconnected.blog and on Substack; a technology-business-geopolitics newsletter with a US-China core; the public voice of Interconnected Capital; and one of the most-cited independent English-language commentaries on Chinese technology — filed here under Beijing by rollout convention, with its actual US base stated openly in this profile.

How to read Interconnected

Used well, Interconnected is a source for interpretation, not for spot news. Its value lies in frameworks — co-opetition, picks and shovels, open source as a defensive lever — and in ground-level knowledge of Chinese technology companies and developer communities that few English-language writers match, earned at PingCAP and GitHub. Its limits follow from its model: it is one person's analysis, published on a weekly rhythm; it reflects an investor's standpoint and a declared sympathy for open source and for continued US-China technological engagement; and its China coverage is written from outside China, from the United States, however deep the author's networks inside the Chinese technology world. Readers who keep those terms in mind will get from Interconnected what its many citers in the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Financial Times and elsewhere evidently get: a bilingual, operator-grade reading of how technology, business and geopolitics connect — which is, after all, the only promise its name has ever made.