Nuclear swords into AI plowshares
Trump admin considers AI controls while supporting remote datacenter builds
Perhaps galvanized by recent autonomous cyberattacks, President Trump seems to be considering further controls on AI developers. In remarks yesterday, reported by the BBC, Trump said: “We’re looking at AI, we’re looking at controls, we’re also making sure that we lead.”
I won’t celebrate before controls have actually been implemented, but I consider tentative openness to regulation to be a positive sign. Doubly so, if these remarks are at all related to the reportedly upcoming AI talks between the U.S. and China in September. As the two massive nuclear-armed states face off over AI, a bilateral agreement to slow down would be better than almost anything the U.S. could do alone.
Meanwhile, the administration still aims to build out U.S. compute capacity for AI. The New York Times observes one effort to circumvent opposition to new datacenters: building on federal land.
My colleague Mitch wrote about this approach in June. If you have a mental image of pristine wilderness being cleared to make room for sprawling complexes, you’re not alone, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. It looks like the plan is to trade one sprawling complex for another, turning reclaimed Cold War nuclear facilities into datacenters and power plants. As these old plants already sit far from residences, they seem a decent place to put AI servers.
I’ve always been more worried about what is done with AI datacenters than where they’re built. Right now, much of American compute only fuels the AI race.
I see a potential for a good future in which remote AI datacenters run fast, efficient AI models to help us solve some of the world’s thorniest problems. But if we’re going to survive long enough to reap the gains from that future, we’re going to need those controls.
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