Becoming Rich with Daily Scavenging APP-Chapter 583: Each Has Their Weaknesses

After Schaefer finished speaking, he explained to Chen Yiyang, which is how Chen Yiyang understood why Musk had delegated Schaefer to help him directly buy a power plant and ship it to North America.

All of this was for the AI competition.

While many established tech companies were furiously competing in the AI field, as a giant in tech innovation, Musk naturally joined the fray.

Musk's AI company is called xAI.

xAI does not follow the traditional AI path.

Like ChatGPT, which follows the large language model path, relying on training models to achieve a level of intelligence.

But xAI proposed a comprehension path, training AI to understand the world and then achieve intelligence.

Hence, from its inception, xAI was meant to counter OpenAI by charting a different technological path.

So OpenAI's CEO Ortman responded by implementing a "choose one" policy, prohibiting his investors from also investing in Musk's company.

This directly provoked Musk into a public outburst, where he berated OpenAI and Ortman from beginning to end.

In this context, both Musk and Ortman needed to accelerate their development pace as much as possible to leave their competitor behind.

Thus, they both faced a super challenge that every North American AI company would encounter.

That is the outdated North American electric grid.

AI data centers are notoriously power-consuming, with daily operations, maintenance, and training requiring large amounts of stable electricity.

These AI companies can naturally afford the electricity costs, but the crucial issue is that the North American grid is too outdated and dilapidated.

According to a research report, last year alone, AI data centers accounted for four percent of North America's total power consumption.

It's estimated that within five years, this figure will double to twelve percent.

This means that within these five years, North America either faces an eight percent shortage for regular users or prohibits these AI data centers from crowding out regular users' electricity.

Furthermore, when the AI industry develops, an AI professional's power demand is ten times that of a regular employee, leading to many regular users being unable to afford electricity.

In this real-world scenario, the North American government, relying on votes, cannot quickly revamp its infrastructure, expand power generation, nor can it let the AI industry stagnate.

Thus, the government can only let these tech giants establish their own power grids to meet demand.

In this aspect, Microsoft, having developed earlier, had already built its data centers and established its power network.

But Musk wasn't as fortunate.

Even if there's an onsite power plant, they need to buy power transformers to utilize it.

These power transformers, unfortunately, have demand exceeding supply by thirty percent, with delivery periods extending four to five years.

For grid connection, one might wait four to five years if lucky, or six to seven years if unlucky.

Thus, Musk's XAI in Memphis, Tennessee, implementing the Giant Supercomputer Project, had to rely on a bunch of temporary gas turbines for power supply.

Currently, this computing project has only 200,000 GPUs. But Musk plans to expand this project to one million GPUs.

But with a mere 20 GPUs, Memphis is already overwhelmed.

One million GPUs would be utterly unacceptable.

And gas turbines can only be a temporary solution, unable to be used long-term.

Thus, Musk has only two options.

One is to build a power plant locally in Memphis.

However, considering North America's frail infrastructure capabilities, this proposal isn't very realistic.

After all, such a significant project in North America would mainly require hiring local workers, or face criticism from unions or local government.

But the quality of local workers clearly does not meet the needs.

So Musk chose the second method.

That is to acquire a state-of-the-art power plant overseas, dismantle it, and ship it back to North America.

This approach bypasses many procedural and regulatory issues.

And it saves the time of building a power plant and many problems arising from weak infrastructure capabilities.

After all, Musk's troubles are already considerable.

Earlier, he set up temporary gas turbine power in Tennessee.

But shortly after these turbines started operating, the North American National Association for Colored People and the Southern Environmental Law Center sued Musk.

The reason being xAI not having obtained necessary environmental permits, illegally operating gas turbines.

These turbines essentially constitute a power plant but are unregulated.

Moreover, xAI's supercomputing center is located near a predominantly African North American community in Memphis, causing this community to suffer from industrial pollution.

In essence, it transfers environmental burdens onto vulnerable communities.

Although legally there's no such claim, if these associations stir jury sympathy during the lawsuit, xAI is doomed.

So Musk is increasingly anxious to acquire a power plant.

Schaefer, somehow networking, got acquainted with Musk, and readily took on the task from Musk.

To buy a power plant outside North America and ship it back, Schaefer naturally first considered Huaxia.

After all, Huaxia's level in the electric grid industry is well-known.

"I'm actually not familiar with anyone in the electric grid field."

After hearing Schaefer's words, Chen Yiyang said, "You can start by finding contacts in Huaxia yourself. If you really can't find them, I'll help you ask around."

"Okay, no problem. You just need to help me identify scammers." Schaefer said, "When doing business in other countries, the worst fear is encountering scammers or those exploiting your lack of local connections, extorting you deliberately."

After chatting with Schaefer, Chen Yiyang called Wen Liangfeng, asking if DeepSeek, with its future expansion, needed to build its own power plant.

"You don't need to worry about that." Wen Liangfeng laughed upon Chen Yiyang's inquiry, "Do you think the domestic power is like North America? The domestic power generation is almost double that of North America.

And even if North American AI companies build power plants, they're merely power plants. Here we connect to grids, AI's power demands fluctuate greatly and are jagged.

Such fluctuations require input from an extensive grid, relying on the grid for peak reduction and valley filling to ensure power stability. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

And the domestic power network is fully capable of resolving such issues.

Thus, we don't need to build our own power plant. Even if future development surpasses current power supply, the government will coordinate power plant construction to ensure our commercial power."

"That's great." Chen Yiyang nodded.

After hearing this today, his confidence in DeepSeek breaking out in the future Sino-American AI competition increased.

Although the domestic chips haven't caught up in progress temporarily, North American AI companies also have such a significant debuff dragging their progress.

No wonder they say Sino-American cooperation is unmatched, turns out everyone has their own shortcomings.