The AI infrastructure race has mostly been described as a battle over GPUs, chips and data centers . But there is another constraint becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: How do you deliver enough electricity to all those GPUs?
The AI boom is getting dramatically more expensive. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft are on track to spend at least $740 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 , according to estimates based on the companies' latest earnings guidance. That would represent roughly a 77% increase compared with what the same four companies spent the previous year. The scale is difficult to comprehend.
Chinese artificial intelligence companies intensified global competition with a wave of product announcements on the same day. DeepSeek’s V4-Flash public beta, MiniMax’s H3 multimodal model, and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 video generation model show that China’s AI players are advancing not only on technology, but also on pricing, open-source strategy, and ecosystem reach.