[Stanford Releases 2026 AI Index Report: AI Systems' Power Demand Now Equivalent to Half of Bitcoin Mining] Golden Finance reports that on April 16, Stanford University released the '2026 AI Index Report,' which revealed that China's top-tier large models have essentially caught up with those of the United States. In 2025, the U.S. is expected to produce 50 representative models, while China is projected to produce 30. Models from six companies—Anthropic, xAI, Google, OpenAI, Alibaba, and DeepSeek—have all entered the same tier in the AI grading system, with very close capabilities. The report disclosed: 1. Based on the number of representative models, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Tsinghua University, and ByteDance are all ranked among the global top ten. 2. U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion, more than 23 times China's $12.4 billion. 3. In terms of citation share, Chinese AI papers contributed 20.6% of AI citations in 2024, Europe contributed 19.5%, and the U.S. contributed 12.6%. 4. Regarding patent numbers, China holds an overwhelming majority, accounting for 74.2% of the global total. The U.S. ranks second, with 12.1%. 5. In terms of scale, the overall power demand of AI systems is now approaching the national electricity consumption levels of Switzerland or Austria, roughly equivalent to half of Bitcoin mining. Excluding cryptocurrencies, the global power demand of data centers is approximately 47,000 MW, with the proportion attributed to AI hardware continuing to rise.