SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk spoke some harsh truths to EU leaders at a G20 conference in North Carolina on Tuesday — and a reminder to Americans about where the future lies.
Speaking and taking questions at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, Musk said he believes "AI will probably increase the global economy by 20 to 30%" over the next few years. "That’s my rough estimate — meaning on the order of 20 to 30 trillion dollars per year."
"Toward a 30% increase of the total global economy — this is quite a lot of prosperity we’re talking about here, just from digital AI," he added. "But from robotics … I think we’ll see many multiples of the global economy, meaning you can increase the economy by a factor of 10 or more. These are mind-boggling numbers."
One question is what drives all that growth. The answer is three things: more chips, more data centers, and a lot more power generation.
"The consensus," Musk noted, "is that there will be a significant power shortfall next year — not a distant future. I believe the consensus estimate among analysts that follows the AI space very closely is that there will be at least a 15 gigawatt shortfall of power in 2027 for AI chips."
SpaceX plans to skip right past power generation limits by building data centers in space, but so far, at least, they're the only company in the world with anything close to the ability to do that.
That's one reason Musk said the exponential demand growth "creates an opportunity" for countries to "construct a lot of power, offer that to AI companies. And in exchange, of course, these data centers would be taxed and have to pay reasonable fees and so on."
The second question is who gets the lion's share of that incredible growth.
President Donald Trump kicked off the discussion on Monday, telling opponents of AI data centers that they would end up “backwards and poor,” and that they were helping rival China.
As previously noted, the last real innovation in the consumer space to come out of Europe might have been the web browser more than 30 years ago. That's a long time ago.
Europe does have a few tech firms with high-end specialties. There's Germany's Black Forest Labs for FLUX-based image generation, or France's AMI Labs, which is just a startup — and a tiny one, by American or Chinese standards — but shows some promise. Mistral AI is probably Europe's leader in AI. The company is privately held, but with an estimated valuation of less than $15 billion, the entire thing is almost a rounding error compared to leading U.S. or Chinese firms.
When it comes to general AI, Europe really doesn't compete at the frontier. There's simply no will across the EU or UK to allow the innovation (or power generation, or data center construction) required.
"You have to have an environment that's relatively free of regulation, meaning that new things must be default legal as opposed to default illegal," Musk said to audience members including ministers from EU member states France, Italy, and Germany, and even EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen.
"In the EU, for example, we find that the regulation level is extraordinarily high, and things are generally default illegal, and this inhibits progress with new technologies," he added.
Take that, various ministers.
Europe fell badly behind the U.S. since the internet became the big growth-driver. So much so that if the UK were a state, 30 years ago it would have been the fifth-richest in the Union. Today it would be our poorest state, ranked 51st behind Mississippi.
Over the next 25 years, probably less, Europe seems destined to get lapped by China, too.
Is that the future we want for our country?
Opposition to building out energy generation, chip fabrication, and, yes, even data center construction is functionally no different than choking off rail and steel production at the start of the 19th century, or oil and automobiles at the dawn of the 20th.
We know how to build the future.
The final question is whether we allow ourselves to do it.
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