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At Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Tesla cofounder and CEO of Redwood Materials JB Straubel warned that China's pace of infrastructure development is moving at a scale and speed that's difficult for many Americans to grasp.

As AI drives growing demand for electricity, he argued that access to energy is becoming a key competitive advantage.

“People will move around the planet to find where the energy is available,” he said. “If that's not the U.S., that to me is a failure.”

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Transcript
00:00I think we should be really worried. I think anybody that hasn't been to China recently hasn't
00:04seen the scale of what's being built in China and the pace of what's being built. You can't really
00:10relate to it in terms that we think are familiar in the U.S. It is a different scale and
00:14it's moving
00:15at a speed that is beyond anything we've experienced. So I think we should be very worried
00:19and really mindful of this. We have pretty robust controls on the grid in the Western world.
00:25You know, there's obviously some high-profile failures, but I don't think it's sort of on the
00:29cusp of just going dark. It is happening literally month by month where, you know, loads can't connect,
00:34you know, things are delayed, factories can't come online, and whether that's an industrial factory or
00:39AI, you know, that's a lack of competitiveness. People will move around the planet to find where
00:45the energy is available, where the grid can grow, and if that's not the U.S., that to me is
00:49a failure.
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