The World's Top AI Bosses Are in One Room. Here's What They're Saying.

Key points

• The G20 Innovation Ministerial, a policy summit for the world's 20 largest economies, is taking place this week in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
• Elon Musk predicted on 2 September 2026 that AI will grow the global economy by 20% to 30% and that over a billion humanoid robots will exist within ten years.
• Former White House AI adviser David Sacks argued that AI data centres, large warehouse-sized buildings packed with computers that train and run AI systems, can lower local electricity costs if built correctly.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and science policy director Michael Kratsios are co-hosting the talks, which include delegates from China, Brazil, Canada, Germany and other G20 nations.
• Day two brings Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown to the table alongside the government officials already present.

The biggest names in artificial intelligence are sharing a conference room with trade ministers, diplomats and policy chiefs, and the conversation is moving fast.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is hosting the G20 Innovation Ministerial, a two-day gathering where governments of the world's 20 largest economies sit down with the tech industry to talk about AI rules, investment and the road ahead. CNBC Tech was first on the ground with live coverage.

What did Elon Musk actually say?

Musk delivered a blunt message: regulate lightly, or fall behind. Speaking virtually on Tuesday, the Tesla and SpaceX chief argued that most governments protect big, established companies while strangling small ones with red tape.

"What most countries tend to do is they tend to provide too much support to the large existing trees in the forest, and not enough to the small saplings," he said. His ask: make new things legal by default, not illegal by default.

He also made two very large predictions. AI, he said, will likely increase the size of the entire global economy by 20% to 30%. And within a decade, he expects more than a billion humanoid robots, machines built to move and work like humans, operating in the real world.

Bold numbers. Whether they hold up is a separate question entirely.

Will AI data centres push up energy bills?

For many local communities, that is the real anxiety: a giant computer warehouse moves in, and suddenly electricity costs spike. David Sacks, a venture capitalist who served as the White House's first AI policy czar before moving to the President's advisory council on science and technology, pushed back on that fear directly.

His argument is straightforward. If AI companies are allowed to build their own power generation on site, they create more electricity than they consume. The surplus flows back to the local grid, which can push prices down rather than up. Companies can also help pay for grid upgrades that everyone benefits from.

Sacks was careful to draw one firm line. The federal government, he said, will not override local and state decisions about whether to allow data centres. "It is fundamentally a local decision, and we respect that."

That nuance matters. President Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday that any community blocking data centre construction "must want to end up being backwards and poor," a much harder line than Sacks was willing to take at the podium.

What happens next?

Day two of the ministerial brings a fresh wave of speakers: Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, whose company makes the specialised chips that power most AI systems worldwide; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT; and Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude family of AI assistants.

For ordinary people watching from the outside, the practical stakes are real. The rules these ministers and tech chiefs sketch out this week shape where data centres get built, how AI products get regulated and, eventually, how much all of it costs consumers.