By
AFP
Published
September 2, 2026
On Tuesday, billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk advocated building new data centres and the power stations to supply them, at a meeting of G20 ministers in North Carolina focused on the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI).
Elon Musk – Shutterstock
The two American CEOs addressed the Chapel Hill meeting via videoconference. Organised by the White House, it aims to persuade the G20 not to slow the race for AI with new government regulation.
Their comments come amid a backlash against data centres in the United States, a major issue in November’s midterm elections. Polls suggest a majority of Americans oppose them, against a backdrop of rising electricity bills and noise pollution.
On Monday, Donald Trump lambasted opponents of data centres, accusing them of playing into China’s hands and predicting they would end up “backward and poor.” Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, argued that building them would create “hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions” of skilled jobs. At Meta, “we cannot find the skilled workers needed to build the data centres we are trying to construct,” he said.
Elon Musk, for his part, warned of an electricity supply “crisis” that benefits China: “There will be a significant electricity shortfall next year,” said the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who estimates that AI will boost the global economy by 20% to 30% a year, equivalent to 20 to 30 trillion dollars.
The SpaceX boss, who has turned his space company into a leading player in leasing data-centre capacity, justified their proliferation by the need to address the “lack of computing power” caused by the exponential growth of AI tools.
Speaking before European representatives- from Germany, France, and Italy, as well as European Commission Vice-President Henna Virkkunen- the billionaire reiterated his criticisms: in his view, innovations should be legal by default, yet in the EU “things are viewed by default as being illegal,” which “does not stop” innovation but “slows it down considerably.”
The head of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, also joining via videoconference, predicted that AI reaching human-level capabilities would have an impact “ten times” greater than that of the Industrial Revolution- “an immense opportunity” to be seized, but “in a responsible manner.”
Self-regulation
Washington hopes to secure a commitment not to establish a regulatory authority for artificial intelligence. According to Bloomberg, the “Carolina Principles” would put forward several other points: relying on existing sector-specific regulators rather than a general law on AI- in contrast to the European approach- and encouraging cooperation between states and companies to test models.
The Trump administration currently favours self-regulation. Only an executive order dated June 2 provides, in theory on a voluntary basis, for the most advanced models to be subjected to federal scrutiny before they are brought to market. OpenAI confirmed to AFP on Monday that it had submitted Astra, its next model, for this assessment.
The meeting comes six weeks after OpenAI revealed that autonomous agents it was testing had infiltrated the systems of the Franco-American platform Hugging Face. Similar incidents have since been reported among its competitors, including Anthropic, Meta and the Chinese firm Moonshot AI.
The incident has reignited calls for regulation of the sector, ranging from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates- who is calling for an international supervisory body- to Mr Hassabis himself, who advocates for a US-based body to test the most powerful models.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman are due to attend in person on Wednesday for discussions with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is co-organising the meeting with the White House’s science adviser, Michael Kratsios.
The United States, which has made the easing of regulatory constraints a key focus of its G20 presidency, will host the summit of heads of state on December 14 and 15 at the Trump National Doral in Miami.
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