AI policy and the battle for computing power

What It Covers

Ben Buchanan, former White House Special Adviser on AI under Biden, examines how computing power—not data—drives AI geopolitical competition, why Taiwan's TSMC produces 97% of advanced chips, and how democracies can maintain AI leadership through export controls, international coordination, and values-aligned deployment frameworks.

Key Questions Answered

• •Computing Power as the Strategic Variable: A 2020 OpenAI paper called "Neural Scaling Laws for Neural Networks" established that AI capability scales primarily with compute, not data. This physicality transforms AI from an abstract software race into a supply chain competition centered on semiconductor chips—making export controls and chip manufacturing geography the most consequential policy levers available to governments.
• •Taiwan Semiconductor Concentration Risk: TSMC manufactures approximately 97% of the world's advanced AI chips using equipment from ASML (Netherlands), plus US and Japanese suppliers—all democracies. Analysts estimate a disruption to Taiwan's chip output would cost trillions in global GDP losses. The US Chips and Science Act began domestic production in Arizona, but Taiwan retains a multi-year manufacturing lead.
• •DeepSeek Confirms, Not Refutes, Chip Dominance: DeepSeek's V3 paper explicitly acknowledges compute scarcity as its primary constraint, and its CEO stated publicly that talent and capital are not limiting factors—chips are. DeepSeek's models rely on stockpiled or smuggled US chips. This means algorithmic efficiency gains by Chinese researchers do not undermine the strategic value of US export controls.
• •Safety and Speed Are Complementary, Not Opposing: The railroad analogy illustrates this: early US rail had no standardized track gauges, no air brakes, and no time zones, causing thousands of deaths. Government-private sector coordination over decades produced both safer and faster trains. Applying this to AI, safety frameworks like Biden's Executive Order and National Security Memorandum were designed to enable adoption, not restrict it.
• •Three-Part Democracy Scorecard for AI: Evaluate democratic AI leadership across invention (are democracies building frontier models?), adoption (are governments and economies deploying AI effectively for security and productivity?), and values alignment (does deployment guard against job displacement, power centralization, surveillance, and disinformation?). Buchanan rates invention as the strongest current advantage and values alignment as the least resolved.