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

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 what where we are right now in terms of the pursuit to be the number one, lead AI country. How are we doing, David? I think we're doing great. Maria, last year, president Trump gave a major AI policy speech. This is in July, and he declared that The United States had to win the AI race. He 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, you know, 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. 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? I I think that we will. I think that the reason why you're you're seeing this huge infrastructure build out is because the demand is ultimately there. I I know a lot of people worry and about whether this could be like a .com situation. Remember where we had the whole fiber build out in the late nineties, then we had a .com crash. The difference here is that, in the late nineties and early two thousands, we had a 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 the this new generation of AI chat bots or coding assistants. And there's just been some releases in the last couple of months on the coding front that, you know, it's if you're following what developed 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 gonna stop anytime soon. And just last year, this infrastructure build out added about, …