I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new powerplants are backlogged for years.

That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere reducing solar).

To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000 worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.

But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.

But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all. Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50% of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous plants.

You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.

The point of your whole argument is that “financial experts” are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the Big Tech would start talking about “energy crisis”.

In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.