It was a matter of time for China to catch up with the US. In terms of infrastructure, manufacturing, and engineering workforce, China has the upperhand and I foresee them becoming the SOTA leaders. Maybe if the US wasn't so busy gatekeeping and keeping things proprietary, they would've had more trust from the open source community.
First and foremost, China isn't energy-limited like the US is. A modern grid, lost of cheap power coming online every day. The worlds most advance ultra-high voltage transport links are tying the deserts in the west to the cities in the south.
It probably sucks for you if the proposed powerline goes through your house, but the need of the many come first.
Having cheap and plentiful power is a huge market advantage. It was one of the factors driving Norway out of poverty 100 years ago.
I think this is really a rosy image of China’s electrify situation. They have huge needs in the east and green energy in the west, they can’t build their UHV links fast enough. They are doing ok at keeping up, but there isn’t a surplus of cheap electricity lying around in the same places where you have cheap water as well.
What is stopping them from just building their data centers in the west where they have energy surplus? Not like you need to locate a data center inside a city.
Water. The west is really dry. We could throw in data lines as well but it’s really bottlenecked by water. Actually the only place in China with water in abundance is southeast China.
Also they really don’t have the chips to supply those data centers, and the government isn’t so crazy to go that aggressive on AI, they have lots of other priorities as well.
Chinese data centers like to use air cooled chillers for cooling, not evaporative coolers. It's simple because power for the chillers is cheaper than water for the evaporative coolers. The opposite is true in the US
Evaporative cooling is a matter of convenience and cost, not a necessity. Other cooling technologies can be used. Intel has already proven a closed-loop system can work just as well.
One of China's big sources of power is hydroelectric such as the Three Gorges Dam, so if you want electricity and water in one place, then there it is.
I wonder if submerged system with coolant could mitigate this ?
There is economic benefits of the cost per a lumen continuously coming down.
The US also isn't energy-limited. They'll just price out all humans living there from buying any electricity.
EDIT: This was obviously meant to be facetious with the intent to highlight the negative effects on the general population that datacenter buildout has in the US.
USA vs. China energy production graph is wild https://stanfordreview.org/content/images/2025/10/us_china_p...
States have had trouble delivering expected EV charging capacity btw
Why aren’t we considered energy limited?
That graph features a completely-made-up superexponential AI growth curve coincidentally reaching 100% of US electricity generation in 2030, but even if you take the prediction up to 2026 at face value, it also agrees that AI is currently a small fraction of overall demand. Of course any individual data center site might struggle with insufficient local supply, but China would have the same problem if they wanted to build bigger data centers. (Production capacity is actually north of 25 000 TWh, but poorly utilized because of a mismatch in place and time between producers and consumers.)
> The US also isn't energy-limited.
I have not looked into it, but I have heard a lot of new data center have to run on site gas turbine on trailers to have enough power.
If the US is not energy limited, why they do that?
See your edit, got it :)
> but the need of the many come first.
The need of the rich, you mean. In these kinds of situations it's never about the many, if it was about them different choices would be made.
Also give it to Chinese labs for the vision of going open source and open models to compete. Apart from their great models, I quite like how they publish papers of their research too.
> trust from the open source community
volunteers in the open source community use whatever is easiest and cheap.
open weights is not open source. there is no "trust".