American Compute Project

THE AMERICAN COMPUTE PROJECT: Artificial intelligence has been the most important technological story of the 20’s. If it realizes its potential, it will define the rest of the century and all the centuries to come. But its success isn’t something we can take for granted. 🧵

Fantastic reporting from the Daily Wire. Our open system is one of our greatest strengths as a nation but also presents certain risks, in this case industrial sabotage by foreign actors.

Left-Wing Foreign Billionaires Fund Groups Trying To Cripple AI Infrastructure dailywire.com/news/left-wing…

If Genesis Mission succeeds in taming the cost of energy, it will enable further progress both by directly meeting new energy demand and by softening resistance to new computing infrastructure, helping propel the U.S. into a self-reinforcing state of dominance in AI.

These focuses are particularly timely because AI itself introduces substantial new demand for energy. “We’re going to stop the rise of the price of energy,” Energy Secretary Christopher Wright committed in November.

In November, President Trump signed an executive order establishing Genesis Mission, an effort to connect federal data to frontier AI models in hopes of accelerating the pace of discovery. 🧵

Read more: reuters.com/technology/art…

The White House is preparing to unveil an AI bill. Science advisor Michael Kratsios says the bill’s goals will be: - Protecting children who interact with chatbots. - Establishing a guarantee that consumers won’t experience rate hikes. - Codifying state regulatory preemption.

In a perfect world, this would be a reasonable case. However, in our world, there are major big “if’s.” Arms reduction agreements aren’t trivial to negotiate or enforce, which is why successful ones are viewed as such important historical achievements. And the Chinese Communist Party does not have a strong track record of dealing with the United States in good faith on matters such as trade. It isn’t clear how we could establish trust with them on something as sensitive as pausing artificial intelligence. On the domestic front, the idea that federal regulators — once they’re accustomed to directly managing AI progress — will loosen their grip on the industry at some unspecified point in the future, flies in the face of all historical experience. Finally, while protecting utility ratepayers is important, this is already a priority of the administration and policymakers in virtually all of the relevant states. Hyperscalers are increasingly pursuing hybrid models where they rely partly on their own capacity to generate energy via solar and natural gas. Utility companies are also meeting the moment by building out new energy capacity, which will ultimately benefit non-hyperscaler customers too. The current disruption in the energy markets is temporary and fixable. The legislation under consideration would commit us to a permanent course of doubtful viability.

Data centers have been a target for local obstructionism — and have now become the focus of national legislation in the Sanders/Cortez bill — because software is hard to regulate. The physical world has been over-regulated for decades, hence the lack of progress there.

The White House unveils a highly AI-centric list of appointments to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, including: - Marc Andreessen - Sergey Brin - Michael Dell - Larry Ellison - David Friedberg - Jensen Huang - Mark Zuckerberg

These are the kinds of requirements that even liberal commentators like Ezra Klein note can slow the construction of vital projects. We would ask Sen. Fetterman to reconsider his support for this requirement but are otherwise impressed with his posture toward AI.

One piece of constructive criticism: While well-intentioned, Fetterman’s Clean Cloud Act — introduced with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) — would require data centers to be powered exclusively by renewable sources.

As AI becomes a major fissure within both parties, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has emerged as a rare pro-data center voice in national politics, repeatedly centering the national security aspects of the issue.