The true bottleneck of AI is not chips but electricity. And there China has a great asset

Data centers are Electricity devourers. A single training cluster can spend more light than 100,000 houses. And while we become obsessed with the semiconductor war, the main problem is still there, in silence: electricity.

Why is it important. Training the most powerful models require superoring workers 24 hours for whole weeks.

It doesn’t matter if you have the best chips in the world if you don’t have electricity to feed them. It is like having a Ferrari with hardly any gasoline.

In figures:

The context. The United States has an still incontestable domain in AI and controls 75% of world computing capacity. But their companies are being delays with years to connect new data centers to the electricity network.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon They have to deal with years of delays to connect new data centers to the electricity network. China, on the other hand, can lift and connect plants in a few months. Unidso’s bottleneck is in the slowness to connect new capacity to the network.

Between the lines. American chip restrictions have forced China to be more efficient. He Deepseek earthquake At the beginning of the year it was the best test.

China is riding its “National Integrated Computer Network”, connecting public and private data centers. Your “East Data, West Computing” plan “ Build eight big hubs in provinces with cheap renewable energy. It is something similar to what we saw at the time with the cryptocurrency mining. The key:

• China puts the AI ​​where there is electricity.

Yes, but. Coal is still 58% of its mix energetic. Although renewables is expanding at a good pace, its current advantage is based partly on fossil fuels. That questions the sustainability of its strategy.

And now what. The AI ​​career will be decided both in power plants and in laboratories. China is building the infrastructure to feed gigantic models. The United States has better chips, But worse electrical infrastructure.

AI needs two things:

1. Silicon.
2. Electric muscle

China is betting very strong for the second and that could be its winning asset.

Outstanding image | ダモ リ in Unspash

In Xataka | China’s three master moves to “independent” technologically from the West: raw materials, chips, AI