Comment by perbu
16 hours ago
First and foremost, China isn't energy-limited like the US is. A modern grid, lost of cheap power coming online every day. The worlds most advance ultra-high voltage transport links are tying the deserts in the west to the cities in the south.
It probably sucks for you if the proposed powerline goes through your house, but the need of the many come first.
Having cheap and plentiful power is a huge market advantage. It was one of the factors driving Norway out of poverty 100 years ago.
I think this is really a rosy image of China’s electrify situation. They have huge needs in the east and green energy in the west, they can’t build their UHV links fast enough. They are doing ok at keeping up, but there isn’t a surplus of cheap electricity lying around in the same places where you have cheap water as well.
What is stopping them from just building their data centers in the west where they have energy surplus? Not like you need to locate a data center inside a city.
Water. The west is really dry. We could throw in data lines as well but it’s really bottlenecked by water. Actually the only place in China with water in abundance is southeast China.
Also they really don’t have the chips to supply those data centers, and the government isn’t so crazy to go that aggressive on AI, they have lots of other priorities as well.
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There is economic benefits of the cost per a lumen continuously coming down.
The US also isn't energy-limited. They'll just price out all humans living there from buying any electricity.
EDIT: This was obviously meant to be facetious with the intent to highlight the negative effects on the general population that datacenter buildout has in the US.
USA vs. China energy production graph is wild https://stanfordreview.org/content/images/2025/10/us_china_p...
States have had trouble delivering expected EV charging capacity btw
Why aren’t we considered energy limited?
That graph features a completely-made-up superexponential AI growth curve coincidentally reaching 100% of US electricity generation in 2030, but even if you take the prediction up to 2026 at face value, it also agrees that AI is currently a small fraction of overall demand. Of course any individual data center site might struggle with insufficient local supply, but China would have the same problem if they wanted to build bigger data centers. (Production capacity is actually north of 25 000 TWh, but poorly utilized because of a mismatch in place and time between producers and consumers.)
> The US also isn't energy-limited.
I have not looked into it, but I have heard a lot of new data center have to run on site gas turbine on trailers to have enough power.
If the US is not energy limited, why they do that?
See your edit, got it :)
> but the need of the many come first.
The need of the rich, you mean. In these kinds of situations it's never about the many, if it was about them different choices would be made.