[anonylizard]

The huge solar power plants in China are in western China, aka deserts and frozen desert mountains, aka you can't build data centers there either. And shipping that power across thousands of KMs is as hard for China as it is for the US.

Hence China is still building coal plants, and won't really stop. Especially if it means the future of AI is being bottlenecked by it.

[maxglute]

PRC is attempting to optimize large compute clusters near renewables via "East Data West Computing" / "Eastern Data, Western Computing". Peak coal is expected in the next few years, new "cleaner" plants mainly replacing old plants. But there's is very much ongoing project to colocate computing/data closer to renewables. If choice is between coal + bottleneck AI, they'd chose coal. But with renewable projected to be 15-30% cheaper than coal in coming years, especially with PRC indigenous semi nodes behind (more power ineffecient per unit of compute), they'd go with renewables + shuttling data around.