> The Chinese are rebuilding their electric grid to be all renewable. It will take a couple more decades, but they are literally printing energy like we print processors.
Sure but decades will leave them very very very very far behind in the AI race so they'll still have to experience price increases before then. Plus even if they do build capacity that has cost that has to be recouped somehow.
They are deploying renewables on a scale that is hard to fathom, they have plenty of electricity across all sources for Ai, EVs, and Robots. What they aim to be is fully renewable (no fossil fuels) within a couple of decades
I suspect you are missing the data on how much energy infra they already have and are building every year
they are already ahead on both fronts as well as have the lower costs and deployment times for new energy creation, transmissions, and battery storage, in short, they are crushing it on energy infra
But there are still costs and environmental impact.
If you need water for example for data center cooling no amount of renewable energy is going to change that (I'm speaking generally, of course you could cool more efficiently or use something else), and so as China continues to build more and more as they are today they will also see impacts related to energy cost and environmental impact just like anywhere else in the world. It may manifest slightly differently, but even if Chinese energy production costs were half of what they are in the US it still costs money to build those things and you can't run them at a loss, well you can and China might, but we saw how that turned out in the housing market most recently.
My comment about building stuff decades out is that there is an intersection (imagine a graph with two lines trending in the same direction but with different slopes) where you have to increase performance to keep up, America is doing that at high cost as you can see, and so China will have to build more and build more now to keep up with scaling (there are so many underlying assumptions for these conversations it's hard to even talk about it) which will then raise energy prices and have environmental effects now, not later.
we are typically not in the position to judge our own tropes, like a racist doesn't think they are racist, it's very hard to recognize our own biases and gaps
you are missing important facts and say the things about China that are common to say but untrue, i.e. a trope
Sure but decades will leave them very very very very far behind in the AI race so they'll still have to experience price increases before then. Plus even if they do build capacity that has cost that has to be recouped somehow.