🇨🇳 Arnaud Bertrand on X: It's done: China just launched the construction of the Yarlung Tsangpo dam project

It'll be by far the world’s largest hydroelectric facility, generating 3 times more electricity than the Three Gorges dam, 300 billion kilowatt-hours.

This dam project alone could power almost a quarter (21.6%) of all US households, since the average U.S. household consumes about 10,500 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity per year and there are 132 million households in the US.

It could also power the entirety of France and Italy COMBINED, since the average electricity consumption in France is 2 223 kWh per person per year, the scale is almost too unfathomable to believe.

Fascinatingly, part of the plan, as per China's “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative, might be AI

It's not only that the dam project will generate immense amounts of electricity that can be used for computing, but also the fact that it's located in naturally cold Tibet with close to freezing water temperature - perfect to cool down data centers for free.

As Keji Mao - who worked as a Research Fellow at the powerful NDRC (the top organization for China's economic planning and policymaking) - puts it: "China will transform industrial capacity into electricity, electricity into computational power, and computational power into ever higher levels of advanced productivity."

🧵https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1946854532043899326