When AI Compute Bottlenecks Become Grid Bottlenecks, US Sanctions Act as Catalysts

Have you ever seen a power bill for a GPU cluster? I have. Our company runs a medium-scale training task, and the monthly electricity bill could buy an entry-level Tesla. AI's demand for computing power is growing exponentially, but the upgrade speed of energy transmission infrastructure doesn't even qualify as linear. This MIT TechReview report covers both energy transmission and US-China AI threats; while they seem like two independent topics, to engineers, they are actually two sides of the same coin: the cost of compute freedom is energy freedom, and energy freedom cannot bypass geopolitics.