China's Energy Surplus May Decide the AI Race
What Happened
Bloomberg reports that China's rapid energy buildout could give it a structural edge in AI, as data center power demand surges. Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned that while the US still leads in AI technology, electricity shortages could become a major bottleneck. China has expanded generation capacity aggressively, while US grid constraints slow data center expansion.
My Take
The AI race quietly stopped being about model quality and became an infrastructure war — and the US is competing on the wrong battlefield. Chips get headlines; megawatts decide outcomes. You can't run frontier models without power, and power plants take years to build while models take months. China's advantage is boring, physical, and very hard to reverse. The contrarian investment thesis for 2026: the best AI plays may not be AI companies at all — they're utilities, grid operators, and nuclear developers.
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