Eva Roytburg reports for Fortune, the astonishing leaps and bounds of the Chinese in clean energy abundance:
“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.
For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.
In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”
AI bubble may pop as a result of running into a wall head first. Asking a chatbot for a simple search might not be clear at first to the level of electrical demand, but a hard limit on scaling AI is feeding electrons to the GPUs in data centers and cooling them with air conditioned rooms. This requires a lot electricity. We are still coasting on 80 year old infrastructure from last century and we gutted the next generation in clean energy production. The grid is just as old, and we have not passed permit reform to make it easier to build transmission lines across states.
Compared to the infinite source of power of the sun and the boundless force of the wind, it seems pretty dumb to pump oil, and dig coal out of mines given how capital intensive. The years it takes to survey, permit, extract, refine, and sell fossil fuels is extensive, requiring billions of dollars. Meanwhile solar and wind on a KwH per dollar basis, it's cheaper to produce a solar farm than to extract coal.
The Chinese Century started in 2025. We gave up when Trump passed his big bad bill.