Stable and abundant electricity is the fundamental resource for modern economies in the AI era
Total power use in China reached 10.37 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2025, crossing the 10 trillion kWh threshold for the first time and making China the world's largest consumer of electricity.
Against the backdrop of flourishing digital economy and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, the significance of this milestone extends far beyond the energy sector.
Electricity is a unique strategic resource in the modern economy. Unlike primary fuels such as coal and oil, electricity, as a secondary energy carrier, cannot be stored in large quantities at low cost. Power generation, transmission and consumption therefore have to be kept in a real-time balance.
Therefore, operating a power system on the scale of 10 trillion kWh requires far more than large generation capacity. It also demands a highly complex grid network, sophisticated dispatch and coordination systems, and sustained infrastructure investment. In this sense, the power system is a manifestation of the country's industrial strength and capacity for long-term planning and systematic coordination.
Just as coal, steel and oil formed the bedrock of the industrial age, a stable and expansive power system has emerged as the foundation of the digital economy.
This is particularly evident in the development of the AI industry.
The AI race is often framed as a competition in chips and algorithms. In practice, computing power depends on something even more fundamental: electricity. Data centers and computing hubs are inherently energy-intensive facilities. A large-scale data center typically operates with power capacity exceeding 100 megawatts, and some supercomputing centers consume several billion kWh of electricity each year. Training large AI models often requires tens of thousands of GPUs to run continuously for weeks or even months, all sustained by enormous amounts of electricity. The International Energy Agency projects that electricity consumption from data centers will roughly double from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030, a level close to Japan's current total electricity consumption. These figures show that the AI industry is not merely a digital industry. It is also reshaping the structure of global energy demand.
