China battery giants ride AI data centre boom with 75% storage surge

This piece spotlights a crucial but often overlooked constraint in the race to AGI: power. As AI data centres proliferate, they’re colliding with the physical limits of electricity grids. China’s battery manufacturers are stepping into that gap, with shipments of energy‑storage cells projected to jump 75% and exports topping $65 billion. Batteries are quickly becoming as strategic to AI as GPUs, because they turn intermittent renewables into firm power that can keep hyperscale clusters running when the grid creaks.

For AGI watchers, the message is that infrastructure is policy. China’s combination of power‑market reforms, targeted subsidies and a $35 billion national storage plan is entrenching its dominance in a layer that now directly underpins AI compute. UBS’ comment that pairing solar with storage is “the only solution” for U.S. AI data‑centre power needs captures how central storage is becoming. If Chinese firms remain the only scalable suppliers at the pace AI demands, Western AI ecosystems will trade one dependency (on Nvidia) for another (on Chinese batteries), inviting more export controls and industrial policy responses.

Strategically, this is a reminder that the AI stack is more than chips and models. Whoever controls the capital goods that turn electrons into reliable compute—batteries, substations, HVDC lines—quietly shapes how fast and where frontier AI can scale.