From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… While American AI researchers struggle with a fragile power grid, Chinese developers now treat energy availability as a solved problem. …”

Here’s what’s happening to electricity prices

PUBLISHED FRI, NOV 14 20252:49 PM ESTUPDATED MON, NOV 17 20251:26 PM EST
Spencer Kimball @SPENCEKIMBALL
Gabriel Cortés

Electricity prices are surging, voters are growing angry, and the artificial intelligence industry’s data centers are increasingly a target for blame with U.S. mid-term elections on the horizon.

Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

…

The tech companies and AI labs are building data centers that consume a gigawatt or more of electricity in some cases, equivalent to more than 800,000 homes, the size of a cityessentially.

Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the state’s recent governor’s race in a landslide by campaigning on cost of living. Spanberger put at least part of the blame for rising electricity prices on data centers, promising to make tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share” of the escalating costs.

…Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/data-centers-are-concentrated-in-these-states-heres-whats-happening-to-electricity-prices-.html

Meanwhile in China;

How China’s Energy Supremacy Threatens U.S. AI Dominance

JACK MURAWCZYK
October 17, 2025 . 10:02 AM

The race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) supremacy is, fundamentally, an ever-escalating energy war. China’s centrally planned, dual-track “AI-Energy” policy is establishing a critical, long-term infrastructure advantage that threatens the U.S.’s technological leadership, forcing the West to abandon strict free-market ideology and adopt its own form of strategic state capitalism to compete.

The current limiting factors for AI development – the scarcity of compute and of world-class talent – are increasingly being overshadowed by a far more foundational constraint: energy. It is on this crucial frontier that China holds a decisive advantage. 

…

China has launched what amounts to a Manhattan Project for energy infrastructure, deploying a centrally planned, dual-track strategy that grants its tech sector a decisive edge in the global AI race. While American AI researchers struggle with a fragile power grid, Chinese developers now treat energy availability as a solved problem. China’s energy strategy is characterized by aggressively deploying clean power for future dominance while expanding coal and oil production to ensure immediate stability. This has resulted in unprecedented energy construction. China currently has 32 nuclear reactors under development. The U.S., by contrast, has built two since 2014. China’s solar manufacturing capacity exceeds 1,000 gigawatts. The U.S. capacity stands at 26 gigawatts. 

…Read more: https://stanfordreview.org/how-chinas-energy-supremacy-threatens-u-s-ai-dominance/

The development of an artificial general intelligence will be a world changing event on a par with the development of the atom bomb.

Most people have tried to play that chess app on your computer, and experienced the humiliation of a few lines of code kicking your butt. Imagine that chess app AI intellectual butt kicking capability extended into every sphere of human experience, and you see what I’m concerned about.

Of course reaching the prize is not the only benefit of an AI Manhattan project. Just as the US Manhattan Project, like the Space Race, produced spinoff benefits at every advance, every Chinese advance towards super intelligence will allow more of the economy to be automated, allowing Chinese exporters to cut prices, further undermining the economies of other nations.

And that is in addition to the possibility of AI powered military devices which can outperform any human soldier. We’ve already seen a taste of battlefront AI in the Ukraine war, where Ukraine’s AI driven targeting has defeated Russian drone jamming technology, by allowing kamikaze drones to operate without a human control signal.

This is not a race anyone should want to lose.

How close are Chinese researchers to developing artificial general intelligence? It may prove to be a problem as elusive as nuclear fusion. Or it might be solved tomorrow. Having said that, I doubt it will be as difficult as fusion, because researchers already have a working template to copy – the human brain.

One thing for sure. In terms of the current most critical limiting factor, affordable energy, China is way ahead of the USA in the push to develop the world’s first super intelligence. If the USA wants to have any chance of winning this race, US energy supply and affordability must be fixed, before the growing voter backlash against skyrocketing energy prices pulls the USA out of the race.

Developing the technology alone is not enough. The USA didn’t start the current AI push. The University of Toronto developed the critical breakthrough which made the current AI revolution possible in 2012. But aside from some Canadian islands of research excellence, Canada is not a serious player in the AI race. Canada’s obsession with green energy and moribund economy gave the USA the edge – an edge the USA is now in danger of losing to China.

Some US leaders are moving in the right direction on this issue, but there are still enormous obstacles which must be overcome. So long as AI development hurts ordinary people by driving up energy prices, AI development in the USA will be in danger of stalling.

A Nuclear Resurgence, But Major Obstacles Remain