Elon Musk warned the biggest issue hampering AI advancement in the United States is a problem Chinese competitors don’t have.
“I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power,” Musk said. “It’s clear that we’re very soon—maybe even later this year—we’ll be producing more chips than we can turn on.”
“We know that with the demands of AI and the power and the productivity that comes with that, it’s going to transform every job and every company and every industry,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told reporters last week. “But we need to be able to power that in the race that we are in against China.”
“China’s growth in electricity is tremendous,” he said.
“Solar is by far the biggest source of energy,” Musk said.
Musk claimed powering the U.S. with solar energy would require very little space, only a 100-mile-by-100-mile square of solar fields needed to power the entire country.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“Unfortunately, in the U.S., the tariff barriers for solar are extremely high,” Musk said. “And that makes the economics of deploying solar artificially high.”
