By Doug Kelly:
This week, President Trump travels to Beijing to discuss a range of issues with China, including artificial intelligence (AI). But while diplomacy matters, America’s position in the global AI race will not ultimately be decided at a negotiating table 7,000 miles away. It will be decided here at home by whether we unleash American innovators, builders, and energy producers, or bury them under red tape and self-inflicted obstacles.
It matters which country surges ahead in AI. The leader will gain decades of economic, military, and technological advantages while shaping the global standards for how AI is built, deployed, and governed. If America leads, the future runs on values such as openness, innovation, and individual liberty. If China leads, the future runs on surveillance, censorship, and state control. There is no second-place prize.
China understands this. And unlike America, it is acting with urgency.
Beijing is not pursuing AI as a narrow tech sector. It is treating AI as a national transformation strategy. China is rapidly deploying AI across its economy and society — in factories, hospitals, classrooms, logistics networks, and city streets. Driverless cars already operate in dozens of Chinese cities. Robots serve customers in restaurants and patrol public areas. Parents use AI-powered translation tools to help teach their children English.
As a recent New York Times podcast observed, China increasingly talks about AI as an opportunity, while America too often talks about it as a threat.
To focus its efforts, China’s government has aligned its energy strategy, infrastructure buildout, workforce development, and industrial policy behind one objective: winning the AI race. Its latest economic blueprint references AI more than 50 times. Additionally, Beijing is investing heavily in building data centers and chips, electricity generation, transmission infrastructure, and technical talent while also exporting Chinese AI systems and standards across the developing world.
Meanwhile, America still spends too much time debating whether AI should move forward at all.
That’s a terrible mistake because early-stage AI is already discovering new medicines, strengthening our military, modernizing our power grid, accelerating scientific breakthroughs, and improving productivity for businesses large and small. Image what might be five years from now? Americans deserve to hear more about the opportunities AI can create for their families and their future, not just the risks.
The good news is that American innovators are still the best in the world. Our companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new AI infrastructure. Our startups continue launching at extraordinary speed. Our researchers and engineers remain world-class.
But at the very moment America should be accelerating, many states and localities are moving in the opposite direction.
More than 1,700 AI-related bills have already been introduced across the country this year, including hundreds aimed specifically at restricting data centers through moratoriums, siting limitations, and permitting barriers. That is not strategic competition. It is short-sighted self-sabotage.
Every contradictory regulation creates delay. Every delay increases costs. Every dollar spent navigating bureaucracy instead of building infrastructure weakens America’s competitive position in a race China is determined to win.
And building infrastructure is exactly what this race requires, because AI leadership is not just about software and algorithms. It is about physical structures, steel, concrete, and electricity.
AI does not simply “live in the cloud.” It lives in facilities filled with servers, connected by fiber, cooled by water, and powered by electricity. Data centers and energy infrastructure are the factories and industrial backbone of the AI era.
China gets this, and is rapidly expanding power generation and transmission capacity to support its AI ambitions. America, by contrast, too often responds to new infrastructure proposals with lawsuits, delays, and moratoriums.
If we want to lead, we have to stop treating AI as a threat to be managed and start treating it as an opportunity worthy of national ambition. That means we have to build. Here’s how:
- Congress should codify the Administration’s AI Action Plan into a durable national framework that gives innovators one clear playbook instead of 50 conflicting ones.
- States and local communities should reject efforts to block new data centers and instead compete for the jobs, tax revenue, infrastructure investment, and long-term economic growth these projects bring.
- Washington and the states must unleash American energy through permitting reform, transmission expansion, and an all-of-the-above generation strategy capable of powering the AI economy of the future.
The United States has faced moments like this before. We built the railroads, interstate highways, electrical grid, and internet infrastructure that powered generations of American growth and leadership. Today, AI is the next great platform for economic and geopolitical strength.
President Trump’s meetings in Beijing will help shape the conversation. But whether America wins the AI race will ultimately depend on what we choose to build here at home.