Nvidia CEO says data centers take about 3 years to construct in the U.S., while in China ‘they can build a hospital in a weekend’

[Daniel Nenni]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said China has an AI infrastructure advantage over the U.S., namely in construction and energy.

While the U.S. retains an edge on AI chips, he warned China can build large projects at staggering speeds.

“If you want to build a data center here in the United States from breaking ground to standing up a AI supercomputer is probably about three years,” Huang told Center for Strategic and International Studies President John Hamre in late November. “They can build a hospital in a weekend.”

The speed at which China can build infrastructure is just one of his concerns. He also worries about the countries’ comparative energy capacity to support the AI boom.

China has “twice as much energy as we have as a nation, and our economy is larger than theirs. Makes no sense to me,” Huang said.

He added that China’s energy capacity continues to grow “straight up”, while the U.S.’s remains relatively flat.

Still, Huang maintained that Nvidia is “generations ahead” of China on AI chip technology to support the demand for the tech and semiconductor manufacturing process.

But he warned against complacency on this front, adding that “anybody who thinks China can’t manufacture is missing a big idea.”

Yet Huang is hopeful about Nvidia’s future, noting President Donald Trump’s push to reshore manufacturing jobs and spur AI investments.

‘Insatiable AI demand’​

Early last month, Huang made headlines by predicting China would win the AI race—a message he amended soon thereafter, saying the country was “nanoseconds behind America” in the race in a statement shared to his company’s X account.

Nvidia is just one of the big tech companies pouring billions of dollars into a data center buildout in the U.S., which experts tell Fortune could amount to over $100 billion in the next year alone.

Raul Martynek, the CEO of DataBank, a company that contracts with tech giants to construct data centers, said the average cost of a data center is $10 million to $15 million per megawatt (MW), and a typical data centers on the smaller side requires 40 MW.

“In the U.S., we think there will be 5 to 7 gigawatts brought online in the coming year to support this seemingly insatiable AI demand,” Martynek said.

This shakes out to $50 billion on the low end, and $105 billion on the high end.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-says-data-centers-181353030.html

 

[tooLongInEDA]

So: China has “twice as much energy as we have as a nation, and our economy is larger than theirs. Makes no sense to me,” Huang said.


Well, I assume he's talking about electricity and that the US is generating enough electricity to satisfy demand pre-AI (otherwise you'd have blackouts). If Jensen is actually saying the US needs to double electricity capacity simply to serve AI, you've got to ask whether we're doing AI wrong. Surely there has to be a way to do this that's lest wasteful in energy and less expensive. Chip technology is (at least was for decades) supposed to deliver more for less ...

 

[count]

My personal view is that China has a much bigger economy than the US.

China has a significantly bigger economy when adjusting for purchasing power parity, and even that understates the size of China's economy.

In a modern service/information economy, GDP does not actually measure production. For example all the excessive health care spending the the US, which is primarily administrative bloat, is counted as production in GDP. All the dollars spent on digital advertising, which does not actually produce anything, are counted as GDP (even those the products being advertised are almost all made in China!).

Any measure of actual production, like electricity production in this case - China just blows the US out of the water.

 

[KevinK]

China has a significantly bigger economy when adjusting for purchasing power parity, and even that understates the size of China's economy.

I think there are really two factors:
* China has a far larger domestic and somewhat protected domestic market when it comes to many products - for instance, the Chinese new automobile market is 2x the size of the North American or EU market in terms of unit sales (or the size of both NA and EU combined). That means that tariffing off markets hurts us, Japan, Korea, and the EU more than it hurts China, which can still export to the rest of the world since China offers ultra-inexpensive vehicles.
* China is still basically a command economy with a capitalist overlay. The government heavily funds and supports favored industries and infrastructure. It also owns most of the land, so things like individual property rights and environmental factors don't slow down favored development. For instance, China would have bulldozed the farmers who delayed California High Speed Rail by 5 years into the ground. And Silicon Valley would have been replaced by 20 story condominium blocks if we adopted the the full-on China "build, baby, build" approach.

ps: It will be interesting in 20-30 years to see if China can afford the maintenance on all the infrastructure they have built, some of it not some useful, plus the required expansions given all those new cars.

 

[count]

And Silicon Valley would have been replaced by 20 story condominium blocks if we adopted the the full-on China "build, baby, build" approach.

I don't think this would be a bad thing from a land use perspective. California NIMBY's are ridiculous.

 

[EganVector]

It is amazing how quickly things get done when there are no rules and regulations to worry about. I think the 3 year estimate on the time to build an AI datacenter in the US is way off; it is probably closer to 7 years (there are probably over 100,000 regulations governing construction of a datacenter). A new nuclear power plant will take close to 50 years. Eventually China will have to deal with all of the environmental consequences of their rush to build things.

 

[KevinK]

I don't think this would be a bad thing from a land use perspective. California NIMBY's are ridiculous.

I somewhat agree, we need more housing here, even if we have to go denser. California has taken a more capitalist, pro-property-rights approach to build housing and even that more modest approach, that is done in conjunction with city-level-planners is flipping out many people. But that's how things get built.

The Housing Strategy That Has California NIMBYs in a Corner​

For years, the state has been nudging its cities to build housing to address a severe shortage. Maybe what they needed was a shove.​

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/business/economy/california-housing-nimby.html