Why The US Will Lose The AI War With China, In One Chart

Hey Everyone, Happy Sunday!

FYI

I would highly recommend you read in full the enclosed article published on ZeroHedge. The article is behind a paywall so I have PDF it. The article demonstrates clearly how destructive Net Zero polices have been and why China is set to easily win the AI War.

If 11 pages is too long to read then here’s my TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) version.

Below, in one (split) chart, is why the US is already losing the AI war with China. Forget Australia – we’re not even in the race.

Before describing the chart let me explain what just 1 GW represents.

1 GW = Power for a city the size of Adelaide (1.4M people) on a normal day…

Or

1 GW = Enough to train a GPT-5-class model (or run 100,000 simultaneous ChatGPT queries).

The Goldman Sachs chart above titled Peak Summer Effective Spare Power Capacity (2023–2030) is nothing less than a visual indictment of America’s self-inflicted energy surrender (Australia is even worse – more on that below)

On the left, the U.S. bars barely rise above the x-axis: a net gain of just 100–150 GW in spare capacity by decade’s end, shrinking to a razor-thin <15% margin against peak summer demand.

Coal bleeds 50–100 GW in red retirements, a direct casualty of crazy Net Zero-era EPA rules and state phase-outs.

Renewables add 150–200 GW in green, but intermittency and grid bottlenecks render much of it unreliable when AI data centres need it most. Nuclear limps forward with 20–40 GW, throttled by decade-long permitting delays.

The result? A grid already at “critical” levels in 8 of 13 regions, with AI alone projected to consume 11% of total U.S. electricity by 2030 equivalent to adding 60 GW of unmeetable demand.

Now pivot to China. The same chart shows a 400 GW spare capacity fortress by 2030 - a 25% buffer that could power the entire global data centre fleet three times over.

Coal surges +200–300 GW, with plants approved weekly despite 2060 net-zero rhetoric.

Renewables explode +300–400 GW, nuclear +50–80 GW, and even gas and hydro pile on.

This isn’t luck - it’s the 15^th Five-Year Plan in action: state-driven, coal-backed, and ruthlessly pragmatic.

While the U.S. debates wind farm setbacks, China wires desert solar farms to eastern AI hubs with dedicated high-voltage lines. The visual gap isn’t just quantitative it’s existential.

This asymmetry echoes the coal additions chart: China 500–600 GW, U.S. near-zero.

Together, they expose Net Zero not as climate stewardship, but as strategic deindustrialization - a policy regime that shuttered baseload plants, inflated energy costs, and handed Beijing the power switch to the AI future. One chart, two futures: America flickering, China overclocked.

Now let’s replace America with Australia.

Replacing "America" with "Australia" in that Goldman Sachs chart doesn't just flip the script it turns it into a dead-set horror story.

If we adapt the Peak Summer Effective Spare Power Capacity (2023–2030) virtualisation to Australia's context (drawing from AEMO's Integrated System Plan and IEA data, which mirror Goldman's methodology but scaled to our smaller grid), the bars for Oz would be even flatter than the US's already anaemic ones.

Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM) which covers ~90% of our demand starts with ~50 GW total capacity today, but projections show a net spare capacity barely scraping 20–40 GW by 2030 after coal retirements and demand surges.

That's a <10% margin in peak summer, risking blackouts in heatwaves, let alone fuelling AI ambitions.

China? Still that towering 400 GW spare fortress (that’s 400 million homes), laughing in the face of our predicament. This isn't a gap; it's a chasm, and Net Zero zealotry is the shovel digging it deeper.

Zoom in on the bars, Aussie-style: Coal, our ageing workhorse (~23 GW in the NEM), craters by -11 to -14 GW by 2030—44% of current capacity offline, per government emissions models and AEMO's ISP.

That's Liddell (NSW), Yallourn (Victoria), and more waving goodbye early due to sky-high maintenance and crazy carbon pricing, with no quick baseload replacements.

Renewables? A heroic +40–50 GW push (mostly solar/wind to hit the 82% target), but intermittency means effective spare capacity is slashed by storage gaps and batteries hit just 22 GW total by 2030, per AEMO.

Nuclear? Zilch, Zero, a Duck! Stupidly banned federally, and even SMR dreams are DOA until 2038 at earliest, per CSIRO/GenCost.

Gas adds a shaky +10–15 GW as a peaker, but with export pressures and LNG commitments, it's no saviour.

"Others" (hydro, etc.) limp at +5–10 GW.

Net result? We're tripling variable renewables to ~57 GW by 2030, but demand from electrification (EVs, industry) and a whisper of data centres eats half the gains, leaving grids "critically tight" faster than the US. 

Australia's Net Zero sprint (43% cuts by 2030, enshrined in the 2022 Climate Change Act) makes the US look pragmatic. We're not just debating NIMBY wind farms we're contemplating shuttering aluminium smelters and exporting raw lithium while China refines it into batteries with Aussie exported coal-backed grids.

Before I continue, let me explain what just 1 TWh represents:

1 TWh = Power for Greater Brisbane (2.5M people) for ~6 weeks

1 TWh = All of Canberra (450k people) for ~9 months

1 TWh = ~1,000 wind turbines (3 MW each) running flat-out for 1 year

AI data centres? Globally, they're exploding to 945 TWh by 2030 (IEA), but Australia's share is a pathetic <1% vs. China's 25% and US's 45%. As for our own hyperscalers (e.g., AWS in Sydney) are already whinging about grid queues, with AEMO forecasting 6 GW/year builds just to stay afloat, up from 4 GW now.

Costs? Transmission alone balloons 25–55% since 2023, per AEMO, spiking bills 20–30% pa and chasing off energy-intensive firms to other overseas jurisdictions.

If the US risks offshoring AI to Beijing, Australia are straight-up spectators - handing influence to a China that's adding 30 GW data centre power this year alone while we pray for nothing burger rooftop solar (projected +2 GW/year) to bail us out.

Bottom line: Magnitudes worse? Try orders of magnitude. China laughs from their 400 GW spare fortress, adding power for 400 million homes while Australia export the coal that fuels their AI boom. We're not losing the war - we're bankrolling the enemy's victory lap.

The fix? Start with repealing the John Howard nuclear ban and go full-throttle pragmatism à la China's dual-track (coal reliability + renewable surge), not half baked-measures.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley's Liberals have finally stepped up, formally ditching the 2050 Net Zero target just last week, scrapping Labor's 43% emissions cuts by 2030 and renewable mandates in favour of "technology neutrality" that keeps coal online and opens the door to nuclear and gas.

It's a welcome pivot after months of infighting, aligning with the Nationals' earlier abandonment letting the Clean Energy Finance Corporation fund SMRs at retired coal sites.

But here's the rub: Labor's still wedded to the dogma, targeting 62–70% cuts by 2035 and Net Zero by 2050, pouring $5B into industrial decarbonisation while our grids creak under transmission costs up 25–55%. Prime Minister Albanese's crew is slamming the Coalition's move as "backwards" and anti-science, but the math doesn't lie as our energy bills are spiking 20–30% pa, smelters are shuttering, and AI firms like AWS are queuing for scraps while Beijing builds 30 GW of data centre power this year.

Vital as it is, terminating Net Zero isn't optional - it's survival. Labor needs to take the red pill (or whatever colour pill wakes you from this matrix of self-harm) and drop the policy while there's time.

Amend the EPBC Act to repeal the nuclear prohibition, fast-track permitting (slash those 5–10 year delays that make the US look speedy), and slap tariffs on Chinese green imports to claw back supply chain sovereignty.

We're sitting on the world's largest uranium reserves so why export it for others' reactors while our lights flicker? A Coalition win in 2028 could force this via repeal bill but Albanese has the power now to pivot. Blend gas/nuke bridges with renewables for a 25% spare margin, not this <10% tightrope. Otherwise, we're not just spectators in the AI race we're the punchline, funding China's grid with our black gold while our tech dreams flat line.

Net Zero kills jobs, hikes power bills, and ships our coal to China and they power their AI super-brains while we ration watts. If we lose power we lose the future.

If Beijing owns the grid and the AI code, Australia’s just a quarry with Wi-Fi. Either we fight back, or fade out.

Before we close the loop on energy, Net Zero's poison pill, and the AI arms race, let's pivot to this Goldman Sachs chart Exhibit 8 from their global research on AI's labor impacts (updated in their August 2025 "AI Exchanges" series).

It's a stacked bar graph slicing industries by their "relative exposure" to AI automation: blue for low-risk (0–10% share of tasks automatable, "No Automation"), light blue for medium (10–49%, "AI Complement"), and gray for high-risk (50%+, "Likely Replacement").

The x-axis runs through 20+ sectors like legal services (sky-high gray stack at ~80% likely replacement) and administrative support (~70% exposed), down to manual/outdoor gigs like construction (~90% blue, minimal threat) or farming (~85% low-risk).

Overall, it spotlights how AI turbocharges white-collar drudgery - think paralegals drafting contracts or accountants crunching ledgers while barely touching hands-on roles like plumbing or landscaping (until the Humanoids arrive??).

Goldman's broader math? Globally, AI could automate ~25% of tasks across advanced economies, displacing 6–7% of jobs short-term but complementing 63% for productivity boosts. In the US, that's ~300 million full/partial exposures. The real sting however is in augmentation as AI doesn't just replace, it reshapes, demanding upskilling or obsolescence.

Now, transplant this to Australia, and the reduction hits harder than a Sydney summer blackout. With our service-heavy economy (admin/clerical roles make up ~15% of the workforce, per ABS), Jobs and Skills Australia pegs 21% of jobs at medium-high exposure, and 4% fully at risk which translates to ~630,000 displacements by 2028 from AI and automation alone (Cisco's 2025 forecast).

That ~630,000 job displacements from AI and automation by 2028 (per Cisco's 2025 forecast, building on Jobs and Skills Australia's exposure estimates) could pack a serious punch to Australia's unemployment rate potentially pushing it up by 1.2–1.5 percentage points if unmitigated, landing us around 5.5–5.8% by the end of the decade (from the current ~4.3% as of October 2025).

International Labour Organisation (ILO) indices crank it to 32% of tasks automatable nationwide, gutting data entry (70% exposed), accounting clerks, and office admins first echoing the chart's gray towers.

PwC's 2025 AI Jobs Barometer warns of a "fragile entry-level market," with women and lower-education workers hit hardest, potentially shaving 1–2% off GDP growth if retraining lags.

Tie this to our energy straitjacket, we can't build the tools to complement jobs as we're importing them most likely from China, amplifying displacements as firms like CBA already axe call-centre roles for offshore bots.

Do we really want China who are flush with 400 GW spare power and coal-fired data centres singing the AI tune to us? Absolutely not.

Beijing's models (e.g., Ernie Bot, DeepSeek) aren't just efficient they're state-tuned for surveillance and control, potentially exporting a "harmonised" workforce ethos that prioritises compliance over independent creativity.

If they dominate (projected 25% global data-centre share by 2030), Australia risks becoming a compliant user, not innovator and worse locked into their standards, data flows, and ethics (or lack thereof). That's not just job losses it's massive sovereignty erosion. 630k displaced workers funnelled into low-wage gigs, while China reshapes global norms via BRI-tied AI in the Global South. The risk? A bifurcated world where the West (and Oz) plays catch-up on Beijing's terms and we become economically vassalised, culturally censored.

Scrap Net Zero to fuel our own AI ascent, upskill aggressively (target those chart's gray zones with TAFE mandates), and build sovereign compute power while we’re still able to do this. Otherwise, China's not just winning the race they're rewriting the rules and our tune-along will cost us our voice.

Final Call to Action – Share This Far and Wide

Australia’s future is on the line. From blackouts to job losses, from AI sovereignty to China’s dominance, the evidence is undeniable: Net Zero is economic suicide, and energy poverty is handing Beijing the keys to the future.

Please forward this entire thread to:

• Family and friends who care about jobs, power bills, and our kids’ future
• Your local federal MP
• Your federal senators

Tag them. Email them. Print it. Post it. Let them know that we demand action — repeal the nuclear ban, scrap Net Zero, and build the cheap and reliable power Australia needs to win.

Andy

You can follow Andy on X @ https://x.com/ANDIKA