“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.
For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.
In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”
Ma, a renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, took her team on the road to get a firsthand look at the country’s AI advancements. She told Fortune that while she isn’t an energy expert, she attended enough meetings and talked to enough insiders to come away with a conclusion that should send chills down the spine of Silicon Valley: In China, building enough power for data centers is no longer up for debate.
“This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations,” she wrote on X.
