Imagine an attack that upends conventional assumptions about warfare — no declaration of war, no troop movements, no warnings. Invisible algorithms pierce through America’s banking systems, power grid, and military command networks, adapting faster than our defenses can respond. Financial networks fail, freezing commerce nationwide. Hundreds of millions lose power. Military command collapses. The nation remains physically intact but functionally paralyzed. Our economic might, our technological edge, our military superiority, all rendered moot by an adversary that mastered the one resource that powers artificial intelligence: energy.
This scenario may sound like science fiction, but it represents a plausible future if the United States cedes AI leadership to China. In the Chinese Communist Party’s view, AI is the decisive battlefield of this century, and energy is the ammunition that will win it.
President Donald Trump’s recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea underscored what’s at stake. This year, Beijing weaponized its grip over critical minerals, imposing draconian export controls on the building blocks of batteries, magnets, drilling and mining equipment, nuclear reactors, and grid components. Trump’s deal-making secured a one-year pause on many essential materials, protecting American interests while giving the domestic industry time to scale. However, this episode revealed Beijing’s strategy: control the resources that power AI, and you win the race for AI supremacy.
Vice President JD Vance captured the logic at this year’s American Dynamism Summit: “If you want to lead in artificial intelligence, you have got to be leading in energy production.” AI runs on computation: billions of equations, each one hungry for electrons. More power breeds more intelligence; more intelligence unlocks breakthroughs in physics, photonics, and frontiers yet unimagined. Those breakthroughs span power generation, weapons systems, and cyber warfare. Each advance fuels the next, creating a technological gap that widens exponentially.
The numbers are staggering. Global policy think tank RAND projects that the world’s AI data centers will require 68 gigawatts of power by 2027 and nearly 330 gigawatts by 2030, four times California’s current electricity use. In this arms race, energy is not just an input; it is both the fulcrum and, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, the “binding constraint.” Much of today’s debate fixates on the capability of the chips themselves. Without abundant electricity, however, even the best etched silicon sits idle.
China is not hiding its ambitions. Beijing openly aims to be the world’s AI leader by 2030, already generates more than twice the electricity we do, leads in over half of AI’s most critical research fields, and shocked the world earlier this year when the startup DeepSeek unveiled an AI model rivaling OpenAI’s, built at a fraction of the cost and computing power.
Many in Washington and capital cities around the world claim to support an “all-of-the-above” energy policy. Yet Xi may be the only world leader who actually practices one. In 2024, 86% of China’s new power capacity came from renewable energy, with 74% of that from solar alone. Simultaneously, it broke ground on 95 gigawatts of new coal, enough to power the entire United Kingdom, and led the world in imports of liquefied natural gas. While we bicker, China builds everything, everywhere, all at once.
The U.S. has spent decades mired in legal, regulatory, and bureaucratic gridlock over everything from porcupines to pipelines. Trump and congressional Republicans are finally reversing course. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act unshackled domestic oil and gas production, created a new Department of Energy loan program for multibillion-dollar projects, and preserved tax credits for nuclear, hydrogen, and geothermal, all while tightening standards to prevent China from profiting off U.S. taxpayers.
The administration’s AI Action Plan, backed by three executive orders, directs agencies to expedite permits for data centers, strengthen grid reliability amid rising energy demand, and accelerate exports to trusted allies. Recently, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the formation of a “club of nations,” including Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia, to keep trade and processing of critical minerals outside Beijing’s control. Congress is advancing permitting reform. Trump committed $400 million to back MP Materials, the nation’s only major rare-earth miner. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pledged to prioritize nuclear fusion, a revolution that could recreate the power of stars using little more than seawater as fuel.
This whole-of-government effort is the only way to compete with a totalitarian state that uses every lever of industrial policy.
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AI will shape the security, prosperity, and liberty of every American. If Beijing captures AI dominance through superior energy output, it gains the authority to decide what factories hum, what cities glow, and what weapons fire. Our economy would answer to its algorithms, our sovereignty to its surveillance, and our future to its strategic calculus.
America faces a choice: surpass China’s energy ambitions or cede the AI century. In this race, there is no second place. There are only those who generate power and those who submit to it.
Conner Brace served in the U.S. Department of Energy during the first Trump administration. He is now senior vice president at Boundary Stone Partners, a strategic advisory firm focused on energy, infrastructure, and technology. The views expressed are his own.
