At the G20 Innovation Ministers' Meeting hosted in the U.S., Musk stated that American companies must develop new energy sources to power data centers; he predicts that AI could drive global economic growth by 20% to 30% and significantly enhance productivity. This growth range is his personal forecast and not an official economic prediction from the G20, the International Monetary Fund, or the U.S. government.

Musk participated in the meeting via video, which took place in Raleigh, North Carolina; other invited tech industry figures included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, and former White House AI advisor David Sacks. The U.S. is using this meeting as a precursor to the G20 Leaders' Summit in Miami in December.

He directly linked the power demands of data centers to the expansion of the AI economy: model training and inference clusters require continuous power supply, cooling, and grid access. If the existing power system cannot be expanded, the construction of computing power will be limited. Musk did not specify what "new energy sources" refers to in public reports, whether it means nuclear, natural gas, solar, storage, geothermal, or other technological routes, nor did he disclose the time frame and calculation model for his 20% to 30% global growth estimate.

The policy backdrop of the meeting is the U.S. push for G20 members to adopt a non-binding light regulatory framework for AI. White House officials stated that this framework would encourage members to avoid creating new regulatory bodies for AI, to test emerging technologies in collaboration with the private sector, and to lower barriers to AI deployment; this means the U.S. is integrating AI infrastructure expansion, private sector experimentation, and cross-border regulatory coordination into the same diplomatic agenda.

G20 members account for about 85% of global GDP and two-thirds of the global population. If members reach coordination on data centers, power investments, model deployment, and talent cultivation, the policy impact will cover major economies; however, the proposed documents are not legally binding, and countries can still take different institutional paths based on energy security, labor markets, data sovereignty, and competition policies.

In market mechanisms, Musk's statements reinforce the capital narrative that "power is the bottleneck for AI expansion": model developers and cloud providers will procure GPUs, data center capacity, and long-term power contracts, while suppliers of grids, transformers, gas turbines, nuclear power, storage, and cooling equipment will compete for new investments. Beneficiaries will be infrastructure asset holders with grid-connected power sources, transmission access, land, and approval capabilities; those under pressure will be regions with insufficient power capacity, energy-intensive industries unable to secure stable electricity prices, and end users who must bear the costs of grid expansion.

Source: Public Information