Elon Musk may be racing Google in the AI colosseum, but his real anxiety is pointed east. The billionaire, whose startup xAI is churning out jaw-dropping milestones at breakneck speed, posted on X that "companies in China will be the toughest competitors" because of their sheer dominance in electricity generation and hardware building.
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That's a telling admission from someone who believes his own venture will "significantly exceed Google." In Musk's worldview, this isn't just a two-horse race with Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG—it's a three-way standoff where speed, wealth, and power decide who rules the AI age.
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The speed at which Musk's xAI is scaling borders on science fiction. Its Colossus data center in Memphis went from blueprint to fully operational in 122 days, housing 100,000 Nvidia Corp NVDA H100 GPUs. Then, in less than 100 days, it doubled its capacity to 200,000 GPUs.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself called it "superhuman stuff," a nod to Musk's reputation for bending timelines. And with the launch of Grok 4—billed as the world's most powerful AI system—xAI is making a case that speed, not size, could be the decisive edge in this new AI arms race. As one user on X gushed: "xAI is the speed force the world has never seen."
On paper, Google remains the heavyweight. Analysts peg Alphabet's AI empire at a staggering $2.5 trillion across its search business, DeepMind, Cloud, YouTube, and more. That's a war chest few can rival, and many argue it makes Google the most underrated AI winner today.
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Yet Musk isn't losing sleep over valuations—he's worried about China's fundamentals. The world's second-largest economy has both the electricity capacity and hardware know-how to leapfrog U.S. players if the race drags into an energy-intensive grind. Musk even hinted at fixing America's power grid, prompting one X commenter to quip he's now "speedrunning civilization."
In the end, Musk's xAI may be sprinting, and Google may be banking on empire, but it's China's brute energy and manufacturing muscle that could decide the finish line.
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