Grace Hsiao

Honestly, energy is probably not the biggest bottleneck right now in China.

And I think people like to say, well, some people like to say, oh, somehow the Chinese government had foresight on the AI boom driving like the energy consumption, but definitely not.

I think people forget that China's economic growth over the last three to four decades also meant a rise of urbanization.

And a lot of the cities that, you know, we are visiting these days, like at least Westerners are visiting like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen with all these robots and EVs or whatnot.

These were all really urbanized within the last two, three decades.

And because of that, the grid is very new.

And because of that, the government already foresaw that there was going to be a increase in energy demand and, you know,

So a lot of the energy plants, you know, the solar plants, hydro plants, whatnot, were actually built out in anticipation for that.

Now, obviously, this has coincided with now the AI boom and it's really helped out.

Beyond that, you know, change.

China has an advantage in the fact that they can actually drive top-down mandates and provincial governments will follow suit.

This is something quite unique to China because it's not like decided by each state.

So when they pushed out the East Data West Compute, where it's basically a top-down initiative where they built a ton of renewable energy for cheap in rural mountainous areas in Guizhou province, like even Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, you know,

Those were like very easily executed, frankly.

And then 90% of the population actually sit on the eastern coastal lines.

Like we think about Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenzhen.

That's all on east.

So that's where the data comes from.

So that kind of optimization has also really helped them, you know, with the low that is the demand right now.

I'm not saying Merkur specifically, but supposedly there are these data providers that do this.