Newly consolidated data from China’s National Energy Administration, compiled by BloombergNEF and the US Energy Information Administration, shows the scale of China’s power expansion is now without precedent. Since 2021, China has added more power generation capacity than the entire United States currently has installed — and in 2025 alone, it brought online more capacity than every country in the world except the US.

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Over the past four years, China added an estimated 1.5 terawatts (1,500 gigawatts) of new power capacity, taking its total installed capacity to roughly 3.9 terawatts by the end of 2025. By comparison, the United States’ total installed power capacity stands at about 1.37 terawatts.

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The pace of expansion reached a new peak last year. In 2025, China added more than 540 gigawatts of new generation capacity in a single year. That figure exceeds the total national power systems of Germany, Japan, France, Brazil, India and Spain — and every other country globally apart from the US.

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The data covers installed generation capacity across all sources, including coal, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and storage. Rather than betting on a single pathway, China has expanded across the board, building redundancy into its system while rapidly scaling both fossil fuel and renewable generation.

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What makes the comparison striking is not just the absolute numbers, but the order of magnitude. Most advanced economies measure annual power expansion in tens of gigawatts. China is now operating consistently in the hundreds, year after year.

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This matters because power capacity underpins far more than electricity supply. It determines how quickly economies can electrify transport, expand industrial output, deploy data centres and support AI-driven infrastructure. While much of the global conversation remains focused on planning, permitting and transition timelines, China has already moved decisively into large-scale execution.

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The data does not suggest a narrowing gap. If anything, it points to a structural divergence: China is building power systems at a scale that the rest of the world is not currently matching — or even approaching.‎

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And as energy increasingly becomes the foundation of economic competitiveness, that imbalance is becoming harder to ignore.