China's Mega-Dam Project Highlights the Challenge to U.S. Future Dominance

In an interesting exchange on X with Elon Musk, intelligence expert Mike Benz shared information about a “mega-dam” project being undertaken by the Chinese government on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

[Note: When I read the exchange below, I thought this topic would be a great test case for me to use the X AI tool Grok to help with research and drafting of some of the text. As a pure information gathering tool, I find myself using Grok more and more often. It is an amazing time-saver over standard web search tools. This is the first time I’ve used it to help draft text. This is not something I plan to do often, and I will always designate whenever I do just so nobody starts thinking I’m smarter than I actually am.]

Here’s how Musk responded:

Text:

As I said a few years ago, the AI scaling constraint will move from chips to voltage transformers to electricity generation.

That is worrying for US leadership in AI long-term.

[End]

When Elon Musk says that the AI scaling constraint will move from chips to voltage transformers to electricity generation, he’s describing a sequence of bottlenecks he believes will limit the growth and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies over time. Here’s what he means, broken down step by step: