Inside America's AI Strategy: Infrastructure, Regulation, and Global Competition

**Maria Bartiromo** (0:00)
Great to see everyone. And I'm thrilled to be able to talk about the issue of the day, and that is artificial intelligence and AI in our world. David, Michael, I'd love you to talk about where we are right now in terms of the pursuit to be the number one lead AI country. How are we doing, David?

**David Sacks** (0:21)
I think we're doing great. Maria, last year President Trump gave a major AI policy speech, just as in July, and he declared that the United States had to win the AI race. He had first of all declared that we were in one. And I think his speech was reminiscent of when President Kennedy declared that we were in a space race and had to win that race. I think since then, what you've seen is that American companies have only innovated more. You're seeing all sorts of really incredible products being released all the time.
I think that American AI models, chips, data centers only just keep getting better and better. So I feel very good about the American position in this AI race. Certainly we have some very competent and formidable competitors. China obviously has a lot of very smart people working in this area. But I do think that just what you see from American companies in Silicon Valley right now is really incredible.

**Maria Bartiromo** (1:20)
And yet there are still so many questions about all of the spending underway to build this out with regard to data centers. And of course, the question keeps coming up. Are we spending too much? Will we get the return on investment? How do you see that?

**David Sacks** (1:34)
I think that we will. I think that the reason why you're seeing this huge infrastructure build out is because the demand is ultimately there. I know a lot of people worry about whether this could be like a.com situation. Remember where we had the whole fiber build out in the late 90s? Then we had a.com crash. The difference here is that in the late 90s and early 2000s, we had a problem known as dark fiber where you had this fiber build out and then it didn't get used. There's no such thing as a dark GPU right now. Every GPU that's being put in a data center is getting used and it's being used to generate tokens. And that's to power this new generation of AI chatbots or coding assistants.
And there's just been some releases the last couple of months on the coding front that, you know, if you're following what software developers are saying, they're saying it's mind-blowing. It's completely revolutionizing their industry. So demand for tokens just increases and that increases the demand for this data center build out that we're seeing. So I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon. And just last year, this infrastructure build out added about 2% to the GDP growth rate. And I think that's what helped propel us to this 4% to 5% growth rate. And I think you're going to see something similar this year.

**Maria Bartiromo** (2:48)
Well, it is certainly leading growth, Michael. And I'm so happy to be able to get this conversation going with both of you who are really leading this. David, thank you. And Michael, thank you. Same questions for you, Michael. Assess where we are right now on AI.

**Michael Kratsios** (3:02)
I think just to remind for the group, for those who haven't been tracking as closely as we do every day, the plan really had essentially three pillars. And it talked about how, one, how can the US continue to out-innovate our competitors? Two, how can we drive the infrastructure build that we need to support this AI revolution? And three, how do we actually share with the world or export our great American technology? And for each of those three pillars, there was quite a lot of actions that the federal government has taken to drive that forward. And I think we're pretty proud to say we've made, I think, pretty good progress on all three. Just focusing a little bit on the innovation one you were talking about earlier, I think the core insight that we've always had about how you drive this innovation is you have to have a regulatory environment that allows this technology to be developed and ultimately commercialized in the United States. And the US has done a great job compared to the rest of the world on sort of setting that up and creating a framework that works, but we could always do better and improve it. And the president, in his speech in July, talked a lot about this issue of a patchwork of state regulations and how can we ensure that there aren't 50 different rules around AI. And what's most important about this debate, which I think a lot of people sometimes don't sometimes miss, is the patchwork is actually most detrimental to early stage young companies and entrepreneurs. If you want to develop a new AI technology, if you want to build something on top of one of our great frontier models, having to figure out how to navigate 50 different rules across 50 different states creates a lot of friction.