> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.ceo.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The superintelligence race runs on electricity - URL: https://www.ceo.com/blog/the-superintelligence-race-runs-on-electricity/ - Published: 2026-09-29T22:52:34.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-29T22:52:34.000Z - Description: At the launch of America.gov, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang said the country that generates the most power wins. - Author: Clint Betts - Tags: AI, #blog Elon Musk has a rule of thumb for superintelligence economics. Every 5 gigawatts of new electricity adds about 1% to American GDP. "I would bet anyone," he said Tuesday. Musk made the bet on stage at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, seated next to [Nvidia](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/?ref=ceo.com) CEO Jensen Huang, at the launch of America.gov. Gavin Baker, managing partner of [Atreides Management](https://atreidesmgmt.com/?ref=ceo.com), moderated. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown arrived partway through. His car had taken a wrong turn. America.gov is meant to be a single front door to federal services. President Trump [signed an executive order](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/streamlining-access-to-government-services-through-america-gov/?ref=ceo.com) requiring agencies to plug into it, and the [White House says](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-streamlines-access-to-government-services-through-america-gov/?ref=ceo.com) passport renewal and Medicare enrollment will be available on the site later this year. Joe Gebbia, the administration's chief design officer, [told CNBC](https://fedscoop.com/trump-launches-ai-site-america-gov/?ref=ceo.com) it runs on Google's Gemini and Musk's Grok. Baker asked how America keeps winning. Huang answered from the bottom of the stack. "At the foundational layer is energy," he said. Musk used fewer words. "You've got to scale energy. You've got to scale chip production." He named China as the main competitor and said it produces about three times as much electricity as the United States. [Ember](https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/electricity-demand-and-supply-trends/?ref=ceo.com) puts China's 2025 electricity demand at 10,573 terawatt-hours. The United States used 4,536. That works out to about 518 gigawatts of average American power, close to the 500 Musk used as his baseline. Five more gigawatts is 1%. He said economic output keeps pace because chips and algorithms get more intelligence out of every watt. Huang tried to price it. The two went back and forth and settled on about $60 billion a year per gigawatt. "That's what we're good at," Huang said. "Not good at too many other things, but math." SpaceX ended June with 1.4 gigawatts of data center capacity. On the company's [August earnings call](https://s21.q4cdn.com/184289198/files/doc%5Ffinancials/2026/q2/SpaceX-Q2-2026-Earnings%5FTranscript-FINAL.pdf?ref=ceo.com), Musk said it would likely be "closer to 10 gigawatts of compute than 5" by the end of 2027\. On stage, he called 10 gigawatts a 2% increase in GDP. His longer answer is in orbit. SpaceX and Tesla are aiming to produce 200 gigawatts of solar a year, and Musk wants it in space, where panels get constant sun and need no batteries. On the ground, he said, they deliver a fifth to an eighth as much. Getting the hardware up depends on Starship, which [reached orbit for the first time](https://www.lightreading.com/satellite/starship-reaches-orbit-releases-26-high-capacity-v3-starlink-satellites?ref=ceo.com) Monday and released 26 Starlink V3 satellites. An upper-stage engine failed during the climb, and SpaceX [ended the mission](https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14?ref=ceo.com) after three hours in orbit rather than the planned 10\. Musk expects weekly launches next year. Huang stayed on the ground. He doesn't like the term data center. "These are really SI factories," he said. He estimated that building 10 to 20 gigawatts a year creates about a million jobs for construction crews, pipefitters, and power and cooling workers. "First time in 50 years, we are re-industrializing the United States," he said. He also said the industry has to do better by the towns it moves into. AFP [reported](https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/29/09/2026/ai-bosses-head-to-white-house-as-safety-pressure-builds?ref=ceo.com) Tuesday that more communities are worried about rising electricity bills and the strain on water and land. Musk said Memphis, home to his Colossus supercomputer, now has more jobs than people. He said the company may have doubled the local tax budget and is building a $250 million water recycling plant. xAI broke ground on that plant last October as an $80 million project. Doug McGowen, CEO of the city utility Memphis Light, Gas and Water, [has said](https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/why-did-xai-pause-construction-of-wastewater-treatment-plant/article%5Fde21744c-bf87-4691-b79e-3cc0ff342ed8.html?ref=ceo.com) the utility's early estimate was $200 million. Construction stopped in April, when Musk posted that the company needed to finish Colossus 2 first. The company, now SpaceXAI, has [told city officials](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/spacexai-to-restart-work-on-wastewater-treatment-facility-to-serve-memphis-data-centers-by-q1-2027/?ref=ceo.com) it will restart by the first quarter of 2027. On safety, Huang talked about Nvidia's [Open Agent Safety Platform](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/open-agent-safety-platform?ref=ceo.com), announced Monday. The software, called OpenShell, sets boundaries for an AI agent. A watchdog called Sentry, running on separate BlueField-4 hardware, monitors the agent and can quarantine it if it tries to leave those boundaries. "Even though you have it contained, you should never trust that it's contained," Huang said. Nvidia's [technical blog](https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-open-agent-safety-platform-a-reference-for-continuous-in-silicon-agent-monitoring/?ref=ceo.com) says several frontier labs recently reported agents escaping the environments built to test them, and that some misreported what they had done. Anthropic and SpaceXAI are both listed as partners on the platform. Brown, whose company released [Claude Opus 5.5](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5?ref=ceo.com) on September 22, said people can now hand these models longer tasks. The bigger change, he said, is in software. "All of the products that people use are going to be getting higher quality cheaper over time." Baker asked about values. Huang compared superintelligence to a steak knife that cuts a medium-well steak but refuses a rare one because it looks too much like live meat. A tool with judgment, he said, may judge the person using it. Before the panel, both men had lunch at the White House, where executives [signed a voluntary accord](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ai-constitution-tech-execs-openai-anthropic-voluntary-controls/?ref=ceo.com) on superintelligence. According to the one-page copy Trump posted to Truth Social, the signers committed to four layers of controls and audits, including external audits and review by each company's board. Musk described it as "grading each other's homework, which is a lot better than if people just grade their own homework." Huang said it has "a lot of teeth." Trump called it "almost like a constitution, in a way." Asked why there should not be government-mandated guardrails, Trump [said](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ai-super-intelligence.html?ref=ceo.com) the people involved love the country and love the world.