Musk bets every 5GW of added US power equals roughly 1% GDP growth
XFreeze · x · 2026-10-07
Elon Musk laid out how AI converts electricity into economic growth: US average power consumption is about 500GW, so each 5GW of incremental steady-state capacity is roughly a 1% increase in power use — which he bets translates to about a 1% GDP increase (10GW ≈ 2% GDP).
His reasoning: 'intelligence per watt' keeps rising at both levels — NVIDIA GPUs improving compute per watt, and algorithms producing more useful intelligence for the same energy — so the power-to-GDP mapping strengthens over time.
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