Really? The USA has built a ton of AI datacenters, exactly because it does have energy. The US IP system has flexed to allow training on all copyrighted content - compare that to Europe where such training is effectively forbidden. Britain doesn't even allow commercial web crawls! And the US has allowed the entire world to sign up and use its LLM APIs.
Consumer energy prices in China aren’t going up because of AI data centers. Easiest way to see they have an oversupply of energy, primarily due to solar.
They don't have many big AI datacenters as they've been GPU constrained for a long time.
Solar is largely irrelevant. You can't run an AI datacenter off solar.
It absorbs the demand during the day / there’s enough for consumers. Similarly China also has a lot of nuclear. They’ve overbuilt their grid several times over.
That consumer energy prices are going up is simply a matter of public policy. Municipalities have the power to keep rates flat, but they choose not to.
Sierra club environmentalists and NIMBYs have the option to shut the fuck up and stop opposing green power generation, but they still choose to
Doesn't China smelt most of the world's aluminum due to inexpensive energy?
I thought that was their thing
China smelts over 50% of the world supply. India/Russia/Canada does another 30%.
Your assessment is correct, those are countries with very low energy costs.