AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over

“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.

For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.

In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”

Ma, a renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China , took her team on the road to get a firsthand look at the country’s AI advancements. She told Fortune that while she isn’t an energy export, she attended enough meetings and talked to enough insiders to come away with a conclusion that should send chills down t