The link between energy and artificial intelligence is fundamental to understanding the future economic world order.
AI competitiveness equals power competitiveness. And semiconductor fabrication consumes vast quantities of energy.
While Western democracies debate subsidies for clean energy and AI separately, China has linked these domains in its national planning.
In fact, Chinese industrial policy breaks down walls between these sectors, giving their firms an edge in cost, deployment speed and market reach.
China is now the world’s first “electrostate.”
The Chinese National Energy Administration (NEA) builds energy systems that rival entire nations. In 2025, the NEA installed 543 gigawatts of new power generation capacity, roughly twice Germany’s entire power system.
However, the country’s focus on becoming an electrostate is about more than a green transition; it is a strategic investment aimed at future-proofing its technological rise.
According to energy think tank Ember, China’s surge in renewables and economywide electrification is on-track to reshape both its domestic tech industry and the broader global transition beyond fossil fuels.
Even as the Trump administration squanders America’s global influence by seeking to dominate the world’s fossil fuel corridors, China is looking to lead the transition beyond combustion.
In addition to renewables, China leads the world in building nuclear reactors and has started construction on the world’s largest power plant, a massive hydropower project in Tibet.
China now accounts for 31 per cent of global clean energy investment, even as the country’s Belt and Road frameworks bring partner countries into Chinese technology and governance standards.
Over the long term, nations that now orbit Chinese supply chains will likely adopt the country’s regulatory norms and standards.
Dominating AI and robotics
In fact, China’s growing dominance in AI and robotics has less to do with its cutting-edge algorithms and more to do with its world-leading investments in energy and infrastructure.
Over the past two decades, Beijing has treated clean energy not as a climate concession but as a capital investment. In 2004, China’s installed wind capacity was negligible. Two decades later, it operates the world’s largest fleet of wind turbines, solar farms, hydro dams, and high-voltage transmission lines — by a margin that is no longer incremental but structural.
The result is stable, low-cost energy that can sustain energy-intensive data centres, semiconductor fabrication plants, and advanced manufacturing capacity.
In a world where compute intensity defines global competitiveness, nations that can guarantee clean, reliable power at scale will set the terms for the digital economy.
For Canada, competing in this evolving digital ecosystem will require converting latent advantage into deliberate strategy. In fact, Canada already possesses what the digital economy demands most: abundant clean electricity, critical minerals, and political stability.
But what Canada has lacked so far is national co-ordination.
Canadian strategy for a new global order
As the Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to understand, the federal government must be a systems integrator in transforming the Canadian economy for a new global order.
Beyond rhetoric or bluster, what that means is orchestration — aligning regulatory frameworks, capital markets, industrial strategy and international alliances to underwrite the energy-tech ecosystems for the coming decade.
In an AI-driven economy, energy, compute and automation are no longer separate policy silos but interlocking building blocks of national power.
This means treating energy infrastructure and manufacturing capacity as a single national strategy — fast-tracking grid expansion, pairing hydro and nuclear with dedicated AI datacenter corridors, and coupling battery and computing innovation to urban research clusters.
China’s rise offers a clear lesson in understanding just how fundamental economic planning is to climbing the global value chain.
Rather than treating resource extraction as an end in itself, China has systematically bound upstream assets to downstream manufacturing depth, securing strategic control over entire value chains.
Canadian leaders must absorb this lesson.
Building on China’s example, Canadian energy and resources should serve as a basis for moving our nation up the global value chain.
Without such a shift, we risk remaining a dependent supplier to the world’s industrial and technological giants.
