Last week, I wrote about how predictions about the near future of A.I. are changing: In place of the apocalyptic language of a year or two ago, you see a growing consensus that A.I. should be understood as a “normal technology.” Others have been more pessimistic, suggesting the A.I. bubble is set to pop, and still others have defended the underlying narrative of progress — arguing that one somewhat disappointing model release shouldn’t dampen enthusiasm for A.I. too much, or that we may have generally landed in a “Goldilocks” zone for A.I., far from doomer visions of machine takeover with remarkable gains being made nevertheless.
But right-sizing our expectations for A.I. isn’t just a question of Nvidia share prices, or even short term G.D.P. growth. And it’s not a low-stakes play for the predictions markets, either. From a certain vantage it looks like one half of the central geoeconomic story of our time. The global landscape is now inarguably dominated by two rival superpowers, the United States and China, and in the post-pandemic period, one of them gambled hugely on A.I., while the other wagered hugely on green technology. The future now hangs in the balance while we wait for the bets to come in.
Perhaps you have seen some version of the charts documenting the evolving shape of the world’s energy transition: Over the past few years, China has so dominated the global production and installation of clean technology that according to certain estimates, it is responsible for 74 percent of all wind and solar projects under construction. This dominance is a result of the country’s “Made in 2025” industrial policy, announced in 2015, but it really took off when the pandemic hit. After initial lockdowns, China was riding high on Zero Covid and the rest of the world was still overwhelmed by the threat of infection and the many burdens that fighting it imposed on us. Today, the dominance is up and down the supply chain: China is responsible for at least 60 percent of global production for almost all wind, solar and battery energy manufacturing capacity; for many of the most critical ones, its share is 80 percent or 90 percent.
These charts are often presented as illustrations of America’s decline, casting a very particular imperial mood. But there are similar ones for A.I. that show the United States dominating. The United States hosts three-quarters of all global A.I. supercomputer computational performance, for instance, according to an analysis by Epoch A.I. And while that is just one estimate, with some limitations, other measures show similar patterns. Last year, American investors spent at least 11 times as much on A.I. as any other country. After tallying up totals for the 15 largest global players, the United States accounted for more than 75 percent of that investment.
This summer, my colleagues in the newsroom published an eye-opening comparison of the energy exports of the two countries, showing that China was obliterating the United States in terms of green tech and America was racing ahead with fossil fuel products. The shorthand implication was that the United States was becoming a petrostate, or at least much more of one, while the Chinese were well on their way to becoming what futurists in Silicon Valley like to call “the world’s first electrostate.” (Sometimes the phrase they invoke is “Type I Civilization,” a term borrowed from a starry-eyed Russian astrophysicist to mean a technological culture capable of harnessing all of a planet’s naturally available energy.)
The comparison is striking, and illuminating, though in several ways the full picture is a bit more complex — these are, after all, not single-industry economies but enormously complex economic hegemons. However miraculous China’s green-tech boom has been, for instance, in aggregate it has hardly made up for the self-imposed contraction of its real estate sector. There are signs the country’s breakneck green energy buildout is slowing, thanks to pricing reforms. And however impressive the rollout of clean energy looks from the perspective of the rest of the world, the country is still burning through gobsmacking amounts of fossil fuel — four times as much coal last year than the world’s second-largest consumer, even as the country as a whole appears to to be reaching a peak in carbon emissions.
In the same way, the United States has doubled down on fossil fuels in recent years, making it the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. And while it has acquired some cultural features of a petrostate along the way, it is ultimately responsible for less than one-fifth of oil production and just one-quarter of gas production.
Total investment doesn’t tell the full story of A.I., since Chinese models have been delivering impressive results despite much smaller investments and, thanks to American export controls, many fewer high-end chips. China may already be ahead of the United States in what is called embodied A.I., particularly in the form of humanoid robots. And the country undertook a frenzied data-center buildout of its own — though recent reporting suggests the boom was somewhat wasteful. It can be a little hard to assess the exact state of the intelligence arms race, given the lack of transparency, but conventional wisdom isn’t exactly that the United States is 11 times as far ahead, as the private investment figures imply. Survey the people who spend a lot of time thinking about all this and the basic view you get of the American position is something like “a little bit ahead.”
The deeper irony for the United States is that one of these bets is tied up in the other, since at least as it has been pursued in this recent phase of large language models and hyperscaling, A.I. really, really needs abundant and cheap electricity. And although the fastest and cheapest way to provide that today is through solar power, the new administration has not just kneecapped the I.R.A. but also undertaken a war on renewables.
This is one reason electricity prices, which have recently spiked, are likely to continue to rise — demand is almost universally expected to explode in the years to come, and we aren’t doing nearly enough to add capacity to supply it. In fact, the opposite: Though Trump loyalists talk often about the need for “energy dominance,” the supposedly future-forward administration is wrapping everything green in endless red tape and torpedoing existing clean-infrastructure projects for sport. “A.I. experts return from China stunned,” ran one hyperbolic Fortune headline. “The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over.”
Just on Friday, for instance, the Trump administration ordered a stop to construction on an offshore wind farm, mostly built already, scheduled to come online as soon as next year, when it would provide a meaningful chunk of electricity to Rhode Island and Connecticut. And investment in fossil-fuel production isn’t exactly picking up the slack.
This is all the more remarkable because the most conspicuous new faction in the MAGA coalition, the tech right, is not just obsessed with A.I. but also chose to join team Trump largely out of frustration with the regulatory and permitting obstacles imposed by the previous administration on its vision of the future. Now out of government, Elon Musk has taken to posting about China’s expanding electricity lead, and in fact it’s on this question, perhaps more than any other, that you can see the beginnings of a cleavage between the tech right and Trump’s base.
But factional politics is one thing, geopolitics another. And if one path for artificial intelligence is that it reveals itself as merely a normal technology, one related possibility could be that it brings about more normality in the realm of imperial competition, too. In this future, perhaps, artificial general intelligence isn’t the contemporary equivalent of the atomic bomb, toward which any self-respecting superpower must sprint, and each party can therefore start to relax some of the hardball tactics recently imposed in the spirit of winner-take-all competition. Pollyannas may even find reasons to believe they are seeing some signs of such a shift, with Trump making an otherwise hard-to-explain concession allowing Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China, amid ongoing trade negotiations between the two countries, and longtime A.I. hawk Eric Schmidt now urging the country to focus away from national-security-focused superintelligence and toward concrete domestic applications for current A.I. A few years ago, China hawks might have bristled at the slightest hint of rapprochement. But perhaps it signals a return to the status quo ante, however strange that was — with great-power rivalry unfolding even as the deep integration of the two economic systems mitigated the friction. Here’s hoping.
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