Elon Musk predicted during a video speech at the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting in North Carolina that AI software will become extremely powerful within 12 to 18 months, capable of completing all digital work that does not require human modification of physical objects by the end of next year at the latest.

He stated that AI programming capabilities will reach "Stockfish level" at some point next year: just as top human chess players cannot compete with Stockfish in regular chess games, human programmers will struggle to compete with AI in terms of software writing speed and capability. This is Musk's personal prediction and not a product roadmap or validated capability metric provided by OpenAI, xAI, or other model companies.

Musk estimates that AI could increase the global economic scale by 20% to 30%, equivalent to an additional $20 trillion to $30 trillion in output each year. This figure assumes that AI capabilities will widely penetrate software, engineering, finance, media, administration, R&D, and other digital work, and that society can simultaneously complete business process transformations, infrastructure construction, regulatory adaptations, and labor reallocations.

Regarding humanoid robots, Musk predicts that there will be over 1 billion humanoid robots globally within a decade, each with a productivity at least five times that of humans, resulting in a total productivity exceeding that of all humans combined. He summarized the practicality of robots as the product of AI software, AI chips, and electromechanical flexibility, believing that robots will eventually participate in manufacturing other robots, triggering recursive production expansion.

He warned that the near-term bottleneck for AI development is power rather than chips. Musk stated that by 2027, the available power corresponding to AI chips may face a shortfall of at least 15GW; chip production capacity is expected to grow at an annual rate of about 40% to 50%, while the annual growth rate of available power outside of China is only 10% to 20%, potentially leading to stranded computing power where "servers are available but cannot be powered on" in data centers.

Musk mentioned that SpaceX is addressing some of the power supply issues by building its own power generation facilities and has leased computing power to several AI companies. Public reports indicate that Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month until May 2029 for computing resources from the Colossus and Colossus II training data center clusters; additionally, it is reported that Anthropic plans to lease AI computing power from Nscale valued at approximately $45 billion.

Musk called on regulators to adopt a "default legal rather than default illegal" approach to new technologies like AI. The logic is that if licensing, grid connection, construction approvals, energy equipment delivery, and regulatory restrictions cannot keep pace with chip deployment speeds, the constraints on the AI industry will shift from model development to power, transformers, land, cooling, and data center construction cycles.

In market mechanisms, buyers include xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and enterprise customers that need to train and deploy large models; sellers range from chip manufacturers like Nvidia to power developers, gas turbine and transformer manufacturers, data center operators, liquid cooling suppliers, network equipment providers, and land asset holders with grid connection permits. Capital is shifting from GPU procurement to self-built power generation, long-term computing power leasing, grid access, and cooling infrastructure; suppliers with delivered power and operational clusters benefit, while projects that only hold chip orders but cannot secure energy and infrastructure face idle risks.

Source: Public Information