Elon Musk appears to have chosen the company that he most expects to succeed in the AI race — and his choice is something that’s becoming more of a consensus in recent months.
In a recent statement, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who also runs the AI startup xAI, offered an assessment of the competitive landscape in artificial intelligence. Speaking with his characteristic blend of technical insight and informal candor, Musk outlined a vision where xAI and Google emerge as the primary contenders in the near term, before the competition shifts to an entirely different scale involving China. Given how Musk would necessarily put his own company, xAI, in the mix, it means that he expects Google to become the pre-eminent player in the AI space, ahead of OpenAI or Anthropic.
“To the best of my knowledge, my best guess is that it will be xAI and Google will vie for primacy for what is the best AI,” Musk said.
He then pivoted to what he sees as the longer-term challenge facing Western AI companies. “And then at some point it’s going to be, I guess, a competition with China,” he continued. “China’s just got a lot of power.”
Musk elaborated on the scale of China’s advantage in one critical resource: energy. “The electricity — China, I think, will pass three times the US electricity output in ’26. And they’ll figure out the chips,” he stated, pointing to both the massive power infrastructure required to train cutting-edge AI models and China’s growing semiconductor capabilities despite US export restrictions.
The comments are striking for several reasons. First, they conspicuously omit OpenAI, the company Musk co-founded in 2015 before departing in 2018 amid disagreements over direction and control. Musk has been engaged in an increasingly bitter feud with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, filing lawsuits alleging the company betrayed its original nonprofit mission by partnering closely with Microsoft. He has accused Altman of prioritizing profit over safety and has characterized OpenAI’s transformation into a capped-profit entity as a betrayal of its founding principles.
Musk has also been dismissive of other competitors. Last year, he said Anthropic, the AI safety-focused company founded by former OpenAI executives, “never had any chance of winning” the AI race. His latest comments appear to reaffirm that view, with Anthropic notably absent from his shortlist of serious contenders.
The Tesla billionaire’s framing of the competition reveals both confidence in his own venture and respect for Google’s deep technical capabilities and resources. Google, through its DeepMind division and Google AI efforts, has been responsible for many foundational breakthroughs in the field, from AlphaGo to the Transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models. In more recent times, Google has created the very capable Gemini 3 Pro model, as well as the popular Nano Banana editing models. Meanwhile, xAI, founded in 2023, has moved quickly with its Grok chatbot and has reportedly raised billions in funding to compete with established players.
However, Musk’s emphasis on China’s structural advantages — particularly in energy infrastructure — points to a concern shared by many in the industry: that the massive computational requirements of frontier AI development may favor nations with abundant, cheap electricity. As AI models grow exponentially in size and complexity, access to power has become as critical as access to chips or talent. If China indeed triples US electricity output by 2026 while simultaneously building domestic chip capabilities, it could reshape the global AI landscape regardless of which Western company currently leads in model performance.