Comment by metalspot
7 days ago
You really have to look at energy/capita and how much energy is embedded in exports. The gross numbers are misleading. The US wasn't building new electrical generation capacity because it didn't need it and there was no market for it (caveats apply, but in a broad sense this is the major reason). Now that the market exists the question is how much can the US actually bring online and how rapidly, which is a real challenge after decades of degrowth politics used to justify slash and burn consumption of the industrial base.
AI is really all about electricity. AI could be completely fake and yield zero value whatsoever and the US would do exactly what it is doing now because the AI bubble is what creates the market for building new electrical generation capacity, which is needed for re-industrialization. Also why our friends in UK/Europe/China are so busy pushing anti-AI propaganda to try to undermine this.
> The US wasn't building new electrical generation capacity because it didn't need it
You need to understand that the US added 40.3 GW of energy capacity in 2023. 70 to 80 represents a dramatic growth (nearly doubling) in new capacity.
Also China is just getting started. 8 out of the 12 nuclear power stations opening worldwide in 2027 are Chinese https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
If AI is "all about electricity" as you say then the US was barely ever in the running in the first place. There's no possible way the US could compete any time in the next 2 decades (putting aside a dramatic shakeup like war)
> Also why our friends in UK/Europe/China are so busy pushing anti-AI propaganda to try to undermine this.
Lol people make up the funniest theories when a political idea they don't like is gaining popularity. At least you didn't blame Russian bots
Oh, the UK and Europe castrated themselves and want others to follow the example. They still don't have made the connection between "I give up ability" and i get attacked by a proxxy opponent by those i gave ability up too.
They do not want to life in the world that is and thats going to be, but in the past and the world they green ideology promised. Reality denial be a addictive poison.
That last para is a novel idea. I wonder if there's any evidence to support/undermine it though?
The concepts of industrial reserve capacity and using dual-use consumer goods to subsidize military production capacity are well known and widely practiced historically in the US. China adopted this strategy from the US, and the US conveniently forgot about it for a few decades in order to justify selling off the industrial base to China, but at least based on public documents like the published U.S. National Security Strategy, I would assess with high probability that this is explicitly recognized and being followed now.
AI is not fake and it does work, but what I am saying is that from a pure systemic analysis perspective, you can do the numbers, and even if AI was complete fugazi, the benefits you get from the electrical generation capacity, and the ability to fund it through private markets, which bypasses Congress, and locks in commercial contracts (often with foreign governments) which will be almost impossible politically to reverse, would still make it optimal from a strategic perspective. That is my calculation, and to the extent that it is correct, I would assume that the US Military's strategic planning apparatus would arrive at the same conclusion.
AI compute has some unique characteristics that make it especially useful for grid management. Moving consumer compute to the cloud means that the electrical use of that compute can be centrally managed. In an emergency, you can cut electrical use for consumer AI by 50% or more, because chips run more efficiently at lower power, and you can shift workloads onto quantized models, reduce resolution for video output, etc, to reduce compute, which leads to minor service degradation but not interruption. AI datacenters are also adding massive amounts of battery storage capacity, which is an additional grid buffer. For every GW in capacity added by hyperscalers that is creating a dispatchable reserve capacity of 50% under completely normal circumstances (hyperscalers do this internally to optimize their own costs) and then that number goes up depending on the scale and duration of the emergency.