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The world now builds
artificial intelligence chips

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faster than it builds
the electricity to run them,

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everywhere on Earth except inside China.

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Which means the two
superpowers racing for machine

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intelligence are each
missing exactly the half that

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the other one already has in abundance.

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China generated over ten thousand terawatt

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hours of electricity
in twenty twenty-four,

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more than the United States,
Europe and India managed together.

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Elon Musk's guess is that

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China eventually reaches four times
American electricity production,

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roughly proportionate, he says,
to the difference in population.

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Inside America's largest grid the wait
from application to switch-on has

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stretched from under two years
in two thousand eight to over eight.

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One American turbine maker's order book

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has swollen past one hundred gigawatts,

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because the thing now in short
supply is not chips but machinery.

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Washington's answer was a fence,

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banning export of the advanced
chips to China,

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on the theory that compute
is the thing you can withhold.

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In March prosecutors charged three men,

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including a server company's co-founder,

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with routing two and

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a half billion dollars
of restricted hardware toward China.

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Prosecutors allege
the machines were repackaged

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through a Southeast Asian middleman,

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with hollow dummy servers left behind to

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satisfy inspectors back in California.

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Scarcity taught frugality,

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and in July a Chinese
lab shipped an open model

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of two point eight trillion parameters,

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costing less per task than America's.

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Chinese fabs are printing
near-frontier chips

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on older machines bought before the ban,

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aiming at one point six million
logic dies this year alone.

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So whichever side fixes
its shortage first simply

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hands the shortage back to the other,

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and neither of them ever
gets to plug in alone.