Plenty of electricity is not enough: China’s oversized AI computing power is not being used sufficiently | The strategist

AI development is often imagined as a race for scale, where competitive advantage is achieved by harnessing enough energy to power the AI ​​technology. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk have fueled this narrative, suggesting that China’s energy wealth alone could win the AI ​​competition. Such claims need to be examined.

In fact, China’s data center expansion under the Eastern Data, Western Computing (EDWC) initiative shows that abundant, cheap electricity alone is not a reliable sign of a unified, operational computer network. China’s efforts to build data centers have fueled interstate competition, speculative overbuilding and fragmented infrastructure that have led to many data centers being decommissioned.

Musk’s prediction that China’s electricity production would triple that of the United States by 2026 overlooked the fact that electricity consumption does not equate to either the generation capacity in different regions or AI computing capacity. Data centers now only account for 1.68 percent of…