> This means that coal, despite now accounting for less than 50% of installed capacity, still produces roughly three to four times more electricity than solar and wind combined. China’s electricity generation mix remains dominated by coal, which supplied approximately 58% of the country’s electricity in 2025.
It's not that interesting. (1) The trend is clear, China is well on the path to being primarily renewables (2) the type of coal plant makes a difference, China has been building more modern and efficient coal plants (ultra critical turbines) meaning they get more juice from the coal.
You can see the effect in the air pollution monitoring, China has reversed course on this front.
It’s pretty interesting though. Despite all the renewable buildout they still rely very much on coal and other fossil fuels.
As it pertains to the conversation, if you are allowing China to make advances and change you also have to allow that for America - in other words we can compete and build out our grid too and compete across the spectrum, low-cost, energy efficient models, or otherwise.
On the high end China does not currently have a competitor so America stands to compete on both fronts with a current advantage on the high end which is what matters most.
If China commoditizes their models they, well, become commodities which means lots of competition and market entry by competing firms. American firms for example can also create low-cost, low-energy models it’s just that there is no economic model to do so. Racing to the bottom is a fool’s errand.
I'm not sure it does. China can churn out all the behind the times models that it wants to and make them open source but what people are willing to pay for are genuinely useful and incredible models at the high end. You can go buy an open source Android phone for $100 from Wal-Mart, but most people choose the iPhone because even though it's more expensive it's better and more useful. Sort of a greater than the sum total of the parts for example.
So sure you can churn out free/cheap stuff, but that's not a business model, that's desperation. This whole thread and conversation is exactly proving the point.
US - gargantuan amount of spend and expansion of compute power and energy build out with the aim to bring about nothing less than the Machine God. Companies are paying fortunes to run the latest and greatest models and seeing productivity and efficiency gains and increases in revenue.
China - lots of idle clean energy production potential due to planned economy edicts (where have we seen this before, cough housing cough), reliant on American tech stacks and chips, releases free and open source models for folks to tinker with that are behind and continuously behind American models. Oh and nobody is paying for the Chinese stuff.
Here's the real problem: in America kids are booing AI models and demonstrating against tech companies while in China everyone is all-in on AI and fearful of being behind. We're completely and demonstrably capable of dominating this space. Newsflash - America can and does make great stuff. We are incredibly competitive, dynamic, innovative and operate with very deep capital markets. We have world-leading companies and will continue to do so even as China and companies from other countries continue to compete hard too.
The risk factor is anti-American propaganda and leftist subversion convincing people that adoption of technology is a bad thing and then we start banning technology or implementing other ass-backwards policies and we wind up behind.
> So sure you can churn out free/cheap stuff, but that's not a business model, that's desperation.
Framing it as "desperation" does have some dramatic effect but it says nothing about the potency of the counter-measures being deployed.
> We're completely and demonstrably capable of dominating this space.
That's the kind of blind faith mixed with self-deception that led to the recent war. Depending on who you ask, "we" are completely dominating "them" but the vast majority of "US" aren't dominating anything, we are being dominated by high gas prices and inflation.
Kinky dominatrix games are full of risk and they aren't worth even 10% of their cost.
> We are incredibly competitive, dynamic, innovative and operate with very deep capital markets.
If you knew something about economics, you'd know that the presence of high inflation is a sign of depleted capital markets. Blind faith and reality aren't the same.
> The risk factor is anti-American propaganda and leftist subversion convincing people that adoption of technology is a bad thing... or implementing other ass-backwards policies and we wind up behind.
That's the usual war propaganda, full of meaningless generalities, sound bites and straw men. The value of technology doesn't exist outside of economics - it's the difference between what it provides and what it costs over the time frame of adoption.
In other words, rushing a generally good technology can turn it into a monster - that's exactly what's happening here. It's similar to rushing into war while other means are neglected or deliberately ruined. In both cases the only results are market manipulation, enrichment of the very few and making life harder for the rest.
> what people are willing to pay for are genuinely useful and incredible models at the high end
I do not believe this to be true in the long run. I think American Ai companies understand this. I've already made the switch because the difference is increasingly small. Progress up to now shows us that the small models are about 1 year behind frontier, and at some point will become good enough for the majority of tasks, i.e. you don't always need the biggest or the best. This conversation is already happening, where people are choosing the smaller models from American companies, or moving to open weight models they can run themselves. Heck, Congress even has American companies coming in to testify about their usage of Chinese models because they do not understand the difference between downloading and running it yourself vs making API calls to servers in another country.
In other words, the future of AI will belong to the lowest cost provider.
AI is energy intensive so being the lowest cost provider will likely hinge on energy costs.
Non-renewable, carbon based energy is more expensive and thus a competitive liability in the AI race.
In other words, China gets it, the USA doesn't.
https://www.energyprices.net/renewables/chinas-clean-energy-...
> This means that coal, despite now accounting for less than 50% of installed capacity, still produces roughly three to four times more electricity than solar and wind combined. China’s electricity generation mix remains dominated by coal, which supplied approximately 58% of the country’s electricity in 2025.
Interesting
It's not that interesting. (1) The trend is clear, China is well on the path to being primarily renewables (2) the type of coal plant makes a difference, China has been building more modern and efficient coal plants (ultra critical turbines) meaning they get more juice from the coal.
You can see the effect in the air pollution monitoring, China has reversed course on this front.
It’s pretty interesting though. Despite all the renewable buildout they still rely very much on coal and other fossil fuels.
As it pertains to the conversation, if you are allowing China to make advances and change you also have to allow that for America - in other words we can compete and build out our grid too and compete across the spectrum, low-cost, energy efficient models, or otherwise.
On the high end China does not currently have a competitor so America stands to compete on both fronts with a current advantage on the high end which is what matters most.
If China commoditizes their models they, well, become commodities which means lots of competition and market entry by competing firms. American firms for example can also create low-cost, low-energy models it’s just that there is no economic model to do so. Racing to the bottom is a fool’s errand.
> it’s just that there is no economic model to do so
"Just"? Where do I start? That just outweighs all other problems combined, by far.
I'm not sure it does. China can churn out all the behind the times models that it wants to and make them open source but what people are willing to pay for are genuinely useful and incredible models at the high end. You can go buy an open source Android phone for $100 from Wal-Mart, but most people choose the iPhone because even though it's more expensive it's better and more useful. Sort of a greater than the sum total of the parts for example.
So sure you can churn out free/cheap stuff, but that's not a business model, that's desperation. This whole thread and conversation is exactly proving the point.
US - gargantuan amount of spend and expansion of compute power and energy build out with the aim to bring about nothing less than the Machine God. Companies are paying fortunes to run the latest and greatest models and seeing productivity and efficiency gains and increases in revenue.
China - lots of idle clean energy production potential due to planned economy edicts (where have we seen this before, cough housing cough), reliant on American tech stacks and chips, releases free and open source models for folks to tinker with that are behind and continuously behind American models. Oh and nobody is paying for the Chinese stuff.
Here's the real problem: in America kids are booing AI models and demonstrating against tech companies while in China everyone is all-in on AI and fearful of being behind. We're completely and demonstrably capable of dominating this space. Newsflash - America can and does make great stuff. We are incredibly competitive, dynamic, innovative and operate with very deep capital markets. We have world-leading companies and will continue to do so even as China and companies from other countries continue to compete hard too.
The risk factor is anti-American propaganda and leftist subversion convincing people that adoption of technology is a bad thing and then we start banning technology or implementing other ass-backwards policies and we wind up behind.
> So sure you can churn out free/cheap stuff, but that's not a business model, that's desperation.
Framing it as "desperation" does have some dramatic effect but it says nothing about the potency of the counter-measures being deployed.
> We're completely and demonstrably capable of dominating this space.
That's the kind of blind faith mixed with self-deception that led to the recent war. Depending on who you ask, "we" are completely dominating "them" but the vast majority of "US" aren't dominating anything, we are being dominated by high gas prices and inflation.
Kinky dominatrix games are full of risk and they aren't worth even 10% of their cost.
> We are incredibly competitive, dynamic, innovative and operate with very deep capital markets.
If you knew something about economics, you'd know that the presence of high inflation is a sign of depleted capital markets. Blind faith and reality aren't the same.
> The risk factor is anti-American propaganda and leftist subversion convincing people that adoption of technology is a bad thing... or implementing other ass-backwards policies and we wind up behind.
That's the usual war propaganda, full of meaningless generalities, sound bites and straw men. The value of technology doesn't exist outside of economics - it's the difference between what it provides and what it costs over the time frame of adoption.
In other words, rushing a generally good technology can turn it into a monster - that's exactly what's happening here. It's similar to rushing into war while other means are neglected or deliberately ruined. In both cases the only results are market manipulation, enrichment of the very few and making life harder for the rest.
> what people are willing to pay for are genuinely useful and incredible models at the high end
I do not believe this to be true in the long run. I think American Ai companies understand this. I've already made the switch because the difference is increasingly small. Progress up to now shows us that the small models are about 1 year behind frontier, and at some point will become good enough for the majority of tasks, i.e. you don't always need the biggest or the best. This conversation is already happening, where people are choosing the smaller models from American companies, or moving to open weight models they can run themselves. Heck, Congress even has American companies coming in to testify about their usage of Chinese models because they do not understand the difference between downloading and running it yourself vs making API calls to servers in another country.
Non-paywall version: https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/property/airbnbs-ceo-says-u...