Artist: stevesack.substack.com
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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China is the world's factory. They produce the goods consumed by every other country on these charts.
The question becomes: given a country's usage of fossil fuels, what do they have to show for it? Western nations burn coal to run LLMs; China is burning coal to build eliminate poverty and produce 30% of the entire world's goods.
Also keep in mind, energy usage has a history. Its not fair to take a snapshot of 2026's energy splits and condemn China, given how western nations just spent the last 200 years destroying the planet.
Why are we pretending China doesn’t also run LLMs and datacentres?
The only reason they don’t have as much growth is import restrictions on Western GPUs.
With Alibabas new inhouse Zhenwu AI processors they are starting to be able to avoid that issue and production of new data centres will increase faster than the many they have already built or are underway.