On September 30, Elon Musk, the chief of a major U.S. technology conglomerate, publicly stated: “The United States still requires massive amounts of electricity, and China has already pulled far ahead. We need enormous power capacity, and expanding energy production is one of the top priorities. I believe we lead in software and all intellectual and digital domains—but in the long term, we must have sufficient power generation capability to compete with China.”
In fact, Musk has been consistently making this argument since early 2026: the decisive factor in the AI race is not chips, but electricity. As of May 2026, China’s installed power generation capacity reached 4.01 billion kilowatts—3.26 times that of the United States’ 1.23 billion kilowatts—and exceeds the combined total of the U.S., the European Union, India, Japan, and Russia. In 2025, China’s total societal electricity consumption was approximately 10.37 trillion kilowatt-hours, compared to about 4.48 trillion kilowatt-hours in the U.S.—roughly 2.3 times higher.
Musk’s assessment holds merit: China has indeed achieved a substantial lead in sheer power scale, and electricity remains a critical enabler for technological advancement, including AI. However, the issue in the U.S. extends beyond insufficient generation—it lies in an energy infrastructure that cannot keep pace with the voracious demands of AI. For instance, 70% of U.S. transmission lines are over 25 years old, and inter-state transmission projects take an average of ten years to approve. Meanwhile, delivery timelines for large transformers have stretched from 24 months to more than 160 weeks, with domestic manufacturing capacity meeting only 20% of demand.
Musk previously warned at the G20 summit that the AI sector could face a minimum shortfall of 15 gigawatts in power by 2027. As a result, xAI has had to construct emergency gas turbine facilities to support its own supercomputing clusters. His remarks serve as a cautionary signal: AI is an electricity-intensive system, and without adequate power supply, even the most advanced chips become obsolete. Yet the constraints within the U.S. power system cannot be resolved quickly through financial investment alone—they involve deeply entrenched structural and institutional challenges. At root, the problem reflects limitations in the U.S. national governance model: while China can mobilize resources for large-scale, long-term strategic initiatives across multiple five-year plans, the American political system alternates between opposing parties, each often reversing policies enacted by the previous administration.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1877712949971978/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.