Stanford Releases 2026 AI Index Report: AI's Electricity Demand Has Reached Half of Bitcoin Mining

Odaily News Stanford University's "2026 AI Index Report" reveals that the overall electricity demand of current AI systems is already close to half the scale of Bitcoin mining and approaches the national electricity consumption levels of Switzerland or Austria.The report points out that the gap in AI model capabilities between China and the United States is narrowing. In 2025, the U.S. launched approximately 50 representative models, while China launched about 30. Models from institutions such as Anthropic, xAI, Google, OpenAI, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are within the same capability tier.Furthermore, China leads in terms of AI paper citation share (20.6%) and patent quantity (74.2%), while private AI investment in the United States reached $285.9 billion, significantly higher than China's $12.4 billion.