On AI, “We’re Leading China By A Lot” Says Trump, But Electricity is Key
By Rebecca Grant: On AI, “we’re leading China by a lot.” That’s what President Donald J. Trump told FOX Business host Larry Kudlow, who headed the National Economic Council for Trump from 2018 to 2021.
Trump is determined not to lose the AI lead to China. “We were stupid people, run by stupid people. We lost our chip business to Taiwan. We lost our car business to Mexico and Canada, Germany and Japan, South Korea,” Trump explained to Kudlow.
No way does Trump want to see that happen again. As a result, Trump is laser-focused on increased electricity production as the key. “AI needs massive amounts of electricity. More electricity than the entire country produces right now, by double,” Trump said.
Energy is the race within a race for AI. As a Brookings Institution report put it: “Washington and Beijing will need to find ways to increase access to energy within an atmosphere of geopolitical competition.” China’s electricity generation grows by 8% per year vs. about 1% for the US. Back in 2005, the US produced twice as much electricity as China. China passed the US in 2010, and by the end of 2024, it was China producing nearly 8 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity compared to just over 4 trillion for the USA.
Trump’s Executive Order, issued on July 23, 2025, laid out the case for building artificial intelligence data centers and on-site power generation. “It will be a priority of my Administration to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout of this infrastructure by easing Federal regulatory burdens,” he stated in the EO.
“They’re producing their own electricity. And anything they have leftover, they’ll sell it into the grid,” Trump said. The investment is already positive. Revenue from Amazon and others allowed Entergy Mississippi to add $300 million to its Superpower Mississippi grid upgrade project. In Indiana, an Amazon data center project is investing in 3 GW of electrical capacity. The data center will require 2.4 GW dedicated to operations, and will then reserve 600 MW for grid reliability for all NIPSCO customers.
Future electricity consumption is notoriously tricky to estimate. One thing is for sure: It’s going up. Note, however, the 2x factor applies to data center demands – not the entirety of US production. For context, data centers consumed about 4.4% of total US electricity in 2023. That may increase to as much as 12% of total US electricity by 2028, according to a Department of Energy report estimating data center electricity usage. Measured in terawatt-hours, total data center electricity usage climbed from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023 and is projected to reach 325 to 580 TWh by 2028. (The range is due to the high error sensitivity of the extrapolative models for estimating usage.)