One of the conundrums of mid-2020s US AI is its urgent need for electricity, and its seeming refusal to pursue the obvious path towards achieving this. China won't have this problem. It's installing solar & batteries at the rate of several nuclear power stations a month.

US Big Tech seems to be doing everything it can to avoid the obvious. It supports a President who is doing their best to ban wind power. Meta has signed a deal to power its AI with new nuclear. Good luck with that, Meta, if past performance is any guide, you still won't have it in 2040. xAI is looking at gas turbines. The problem there? The waiting list for new turbines stretches to the 2030s. Never fear. It will just spend orders of magnitude more than China does with solar+batteries to put data centers in space.

What's the problem with embracing solar+batteries? The AI firms are slated to spend $660 billion in 2026 alone. They could replicate a huge chunk of China's solar manufacturing capacity with some of that. There are plenty of home-grown grid storage startups with batteries, too.

The inevitable conclusion? Consumers will subsidize their mistakes with higher electricity prices as they use up more and more of the existing grid's capacity, as none of their decisions with gas, nuclear or data centers in space work out.