The US is falling behind China in energy generation, according to Silicon Valley start-up Anthropic, as the artificial intelligence company urges Washington to “slash red tape” surrounding power infrastructure development amid escalating competition with China.
Last year, China added 400 gigawatts of power capacity, while the US added only “several dozen” – amounting to just one-tenth of China’s total, Anthropic said in a report published on Tuesday, citing numbers from a report in February by Australian think tank Climate Energy Finance.
Anthropic, the San Francisco-based firm behind the Claude large language models, noted that the AI sector in the US would require at least 50 gigawatts of power capacity by 2028, and the disparity in power capacity with China was “concerning”.
Energy has emerged as a critical battleground in the intensifying US-China AI race, where the world’s two largest economies are engaged in fierce competition in fields ranging from AI algorithms to advanced semiconductor technology.
While US capital expenditure on AI was heavily focused on hardware like semiconductors, a significant portion of China’s AI investment this year would go towards building data centres and the energy infrastructure needed to support them, said Matty Zhao, co-head of China equity research at Bank of America Securities, in an interview with the Post last month.
