@alex_verem: The Chinese president stood on a stage in Shanghai and laid out China's entire AI playbook in one speech. It was his fi…

The Chinese president stood on a stage in Shanghai and laid out China’s entire AI playbook in one speech.

It was his first-ever in-person appearance at the World AI Conference. I went through the whole thing and pulled out everything that matters.

• he opened with his signature maxim that great changes unseen in a century are unfolding across the world.

• he said AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation.

• he reaffirmed China’s commitment to open source AI in the name of openness and shared benefit.

• he warned against overstretching the concept of national security in AI, where one country puts its own security above everyone else’s.

• he said China opposes the emergence of new historical injustices in AI, one of the strongest-worded lines in the speech.

• he pledged 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over the next five years, naming ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the SCO, and BRICS.

• he committed to giving 30 countries access to a Chinese AI weather system that provides early disaster warnings.

• a day before the speech, 29 countries signed the agreement creating a new World AI Cooperation Organization headquartered in Shanghai.

strip away the politics and one thing stands out to me. he didn’t pitch benchmarks or chatbots. he pitched AI as infrastructure, weather warnings for countries that lose thousands of lives to storms they never saw coming, and training programs for regions the AI boom has skipped.

meanwhile most of the Western AI conversation revolves around which lab ships the next frontier model.

I don’t care who wins the race. I care whether the computing power reaches the people who need it.

The full speech is below, and it’s worth your time.

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yup

100%

This guy’s engineering team is very good btw

AI datacenters used 264 billion gallons of water globally in 2025. Sweden’s datacenters run on closed-loop cooling that consumes effectively no freshwater. that’s not a technology problem, it’s a choice.

there’s a popular chart from CBS comparing AI water use to lawn irrigation and toilet flushes. it pegs U.S. datacenter cooling at 17 billion gallons, using 2023 data. the global number for 2025 is 264 billion gallons, enough to supply 1.8 million Americans for a year. and that includes the water used to generate the electricity those datacenters consume. a single large facility can drink 5 million gallons a day. that’s the same as a town of 50,000 people.

both sides of this argument get it wrong.

the “AI uses no water” crowd points at 2023 numbers and calls it a rounding error. that data is already obsolete. the “AI is evil” crowd says shut it all down. that ignores the solutions already working at scale.

Sweden runs closed-loop cooling across its datacenters and consumes effectively no freshwater for evaporative cooling. the waste heat doesn’t get dumped. it flows into homes. Stockholm’s open district heating program pipes datacenter waste heat into 30,000 apartments. Microsoft is building a datacenter region in Finland that will heat 250,000 people. Google covers 80% of Hamina’s local heating demand for free with datacenter exhaust. Germany now requires new datacenters to recover at least 10% of their waste heat by law.

the technology exists. the engineering works. the economics pencil out.

most U.S. datacenters still use evaporative cooling because it’s cheaper up front. they pump millions of gallons of freshwater through cooling towers and let it evaporate. they’re doing this in Arizona, Texas, and the Southwest while 63% of the country sits in drought.

the problem was never AI. the problem is choosing the cheapest cooling method in a drought zone and calling it innovation.

if this industry is serious about AI helping the planet, the datacenters are the first test, not the models.

“Don’t evangelize AI to skeptics. Show them evidence on their own code. Skepticism doesn’t kill AI adoption. Hype does.

Because hype promises things that don’t happen, and then the skeptics are proven right.“

Well said.