{"id":212607,"date":"2026-09-03T03:55:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T03:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/212607\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T03:55:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T03:55:17","slug":"at-the-g20-zuckerberg-and-musk-call-for-more-ai-data-centres-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/212607\/","title":{"rendered":"At the G20, Zuckerberg and Musk call for more AI data centres"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n By
\n
AFP\n <\/p>\n

\n Published
\n <\/p>\n

September 2, 2026<\/p>\n

\n On Tuesday, billionaires Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n

\"ElonElon Musk – Shutterstock<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Their comments come amid a backlash against data centres in the United States, a major issue in November\u2019s midterm elections. Polls suggest a majority of Americans oppose them, against a backdrop of rising electricity bills and noise pollution.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Donald Trump<\/a> lambasted opponents of data centres, accusing them of playing into China\u2019s hands and predicting they would end up \u201cbackward and poor.\u201d Meta\u2019s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, argued that building them would create \u201chundreds of thousands and perhaps millions\u201d of skilled jobs. At Meta, \u201cwe cannot find the skilled workers needed to build the data centres we are trying to construct,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk, for his part, warned of an electricity supply \u201ccrisis\u201d that benefits China: \u201cThere will be a significant electricity shortfall next year,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clack of computing power\u201d caused by the exponential growth of AI tools.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthings are viewed by default as being illegal,\u201d which \u201cdoes not stop\u201d innovation but \u201cslows it down considerably.\u201d<\/p>\n

The head of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, also joining via videoconference, predicted that AI reaching human-level capabilities would have an impact \u201cten times\u201d greater than that of the Industrial Revolution- \u201can immense opportunity\u201d to be seized, but \u201cin a responsible manner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Self-regulation<\/p>\n

Washington hopes to secure a commitment not to establish a regulatory authority for artificial intelligence. According to Bloomberg, the \u201cCarolina Principles\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration currently favours self-regulation. Only<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Nvidia\u2019s CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI\u2019s 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\u2019s science adviser, Michael Kratsios.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0at the Trump National Doral in Miami.\n <\/p>\n

\n Copyright \u00a9 2026 AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By AFP Published September 2, 2026 On Tuesday, billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk advocated building new data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[154],"tags":[31831,12,2453,768,618,94628,9090,38549,61176],"class_list":["post-212607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-zuckerberg","tag-beauty","tag-donald-trump","tag-fashion","tag-luxury","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-microsoft-france","tag-network","tag-only","tag-professionals"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117205095473220977","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}