According to the Huanqiu editorial, AI data centers have entered the US policy agenda since the election, and a joke has spread about American firms building data centers in China. The wordplay echoes China's ‘East Data, West Compute’ program, and the editorial reads it as a sign that slow grid upgrades, long grid-connection queues for big compute clusters and high construction costs are bottlenecking US expansion.

The editorial credits China with lower energy costs, stable power and a complete supporting industry. Its cited estimates say US data-center projects typically take over three years to deliver against about 12 months for a comparable 100-megawatt project in China, and cost roughly $8 million to $12 million per megawatt in the US versus $5.5 million to $6.5 million in China. No source is given.

Limits on cooperation and criticism of US policy

It adds that national security, personal privacy and critical-infrastructure data must be strictly protected, and cross-border compute must weigh latency, transmission cost, intellectual property and compliance. It criticizes Washington for ‘weaponizing’ compute, chips and data through widening export controls and investment screening, and reads the joke as netizens' irony about US digital decoupling.

Washington has long cited national security as the reason for controls on advanced chips and data, a point widely known, but a direct US response to this editorial could not be confirmed. Huanqiu belongs to the state-run Global Times group and takes a clear line, and the editorial's figures were not independently verified.

The editorial concludes that US-China cooperation on AI remains necessary and its results should be tangible to people in both countries, and it calls on both sides to improve global AI governance and promote inclusive development.