Elon Musk has singled out the country he believes poses the biggest challenge in the global race to build artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n
In a post on X<\/a>, the Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk<\/a> wrote that “China is also by far the strongest competitor in AI,<\/strong>” responding to a resurfaced comment he made in 2011 about the country’s long-term challenge in rocket technology. <\/p>\n The remark quickly circulated among technology and policy watchers. <\/p>\n Musk has repeatedly pointed to China’s rapid progress in AI models, manufacturing scale and energy capacity as factors that could allow Chinese companies to take the lead. <\/p>\n A consistent view on the competition <\/p>\n Musk’s latest comment builds on earlier statements. In a recent interview <\/a>he said there is “a good chance” Chinese AI firms will become the leaders if they gain greater access to computing power. <\/p>\n Related: Elon Musk’s AI warning about the dollar is starting to come true<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n He has noted that Chinese labs are already delivering strong results with relatively limited compute resources. <\/p>\n Electricity and advanced chips remain the main constraints on AI development, he has argued, and China holds a clear advantage in power generation. <\/p>\n Musk has also highlighted China’s strength in robotics and physical AI systems<\/a>. He has described Chinese companies as highly capable at scaling manufacturing, a point he has made when discussing Tesla’s own humanoid robot efforts. <\/p>\n Trending on TheStreet Roundtable: Why the warning carries weight <\/p>\n The post comes as independent assessments show the performance gap between leading U.S. and Chinese AI models has narrowed significantly<\/a>. Reports indicate the two countries have traded the top spot in certain benchmarks over the past year. <\/p>\n While the United States still leads in private investment and the number of notable models released, China dominates in research papers, citations and patents. <\/p>\n Musk has long<\/a> warned about the broader risks of advanced AI, including the possibility of systems that escape human control. <\/p>\n His focus on China frames the race not only as a technological contest but as a strategic one with national implications. <\/p>\n For now, his message is straightforward that in AI, as in rocketry years earlier, China stands as the primary challenger. <\/p>\n Where crypto enters the picture <\/p>\n Musk’s emphasis on power and compute as the true bottlenecks helps explain a shift already reshaping the crypto industry. Bitcoin miners<\/a>, which run large, energy-hungry data centers, have been repositioning themselves as AI infrastructure providers, leasing their power capacity to AI companies desperate for it. The logic mirrors Musk’s own: whoever controls electricity and computing capacity holds an edge in the AI race. <\/p>\n The deals have been striking in scale. In December 2025, Hut 8 signed a 15-year<\/a>, $7 billion lease with cloud provider Fluidstack for 245 megawatts of capacity at its River Bend campus in Louisiana, tied to a broader partnership to host AI workloads for Anthropic. In July 2026, TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic<\/a> expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue, a figure that exceeded the miner’s entire market value at the time. Closer to home for U.S. readers, Riot Platforms struck a $9 billion<\/a>, 20-year compute deal with Anthropic in August 2026, leasing 191 megawatts at its Texas campus. <\/p>\n Together, these deals show how scarce, grid-connected power has become one of the most valuable resources in the AI buildout. <\/p>\n Related: If you invested $1,000 in gold, Bitcoin and $TRUMP on Inauguration Day, here is what each is worth today<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n This story was originally published by TheStreet<\/a> on Aug 20, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS<\/a> section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk has singled out the country he believes poses the biggest challenge in the global race to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,381,58132,18,1647,274077,19,17,4626,274078,82,274076],"class_list":["post-648109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-china","tag-chinese-companies","tag-eire","tag-elon-musk","tag-energy-capacity","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-power-generation","tag-rocket-technology","tag-technology","tag-tesla-and-spacex"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117130525827841250","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}