19 Nov 2025
The American bet is simple: own the most compute, win the AI race.
But China isn’t playing that game.
Instead of chasing data center volume, China open-sourced frontier models (DeepSeek, Qwen, Baichuan) that run on cheap hardware.
DeepSeek trained a frontier model for $5–6M (vs. tens of millions in the US).
Inference costs are ~280x cheaper than ChatGPT.
Modular data centers deploy in weeks, built around ultra-low-cost power.
China isn’t scaling infrastructure. They’re scaling efficiency — and commoditizing intelligence.
Meanwhile, the US is hitting a wall: the power grid.
Data centers already use 6% of US electricity, headed to 11% by 2030.
Spare grid capacity has fallen from 26% → 19%, on track for <15%.
Some regions face 7-year waitlists just to connect new facilities.
Ohio alone rejected 17 GW of new data center interconnection requests.
You can build data centers. But can you power them?
China can.
By 2025, their installed capacity hits 3.99 TW (up 19% YoY). Renewables are nearly half of all generation. In the first five months of 2025 alone:
197 GW solar added
46 GW wind added
By 2030, China is expected to have 400 GW of spare power capacity — over 3× global data center demand.
The US built the most data centers.
China built the power to scale whatever it wants.
The real race isn’t about who has more compute today — it’s who can power their compute tomorrow. And on that dimension, China is pulling ahead.
Source: StockMarket.news, Apollo
