By Mike Sarrielle and Kirk Offel
Charles Payne recently put it plainly on FOX Business, and he is right: “America must win the AI race.” But the stakes are higher than market cap. or stock valuations. The nation that leads in AI, and in the compute, power, and physical infrastructure behind it, will dominate the kill chain, shape intelligence analysis, cyber operations, autonomous targeting, and command the next generation of kinetic warfare.
In this era of Great Power Competition, AI is not a software feature. It is the new high ground.
Washington must face an uncomfortable truth: You do not win an AI arms race with white papers, speeches, or regulatory theater. You win it with steel in the ground, data centers, high-voltage transmission lines, turbines, and a skilled industrial workforce capable of deploying mission-critical infrastructure at wartime speed. Right now, the United States is losing that race.
China isn’t waiting for permission to build. Beijing’s “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative is the most aggressive AI-infrastructure mobilization on the planet. It is a state-driven campaign to deploy massive scale compute with military precision, relocating workloads to the energy-rich west and routing intelligence back to the east. While American developers navigate NEPA delays and local zoning battles, China pours concrete. A Council on Foreign Relations task force recently warned that Chinese AI data centers are completed six to sixteen months faster than their U.S. counterparts. In strategic competition, “eventually” is too late.
Infrastructure is Ordnance
Data centers are not commercial real estate; they are the munitions plants of the Fifth Industrial Revolution. AI runs on compute, and compute runs on physical infrastructure. Bureaucratic inertia is unilateral disarmament.
America does not lack capital, it lacks speed. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has noted that while the U.S. takes years to commission a data center, China can mobilize resources to build critical infrastructure in months. To compete, we need a permitting reform mindset that treats AI infrastructure with the same urgency as the Manhattan Project or the Interstate Highway System.
The Human Supply Chain
Our bottleneck is not just regulatory; it is human. America faces a workforce throughput crisis, a shortage of trained electricians, mechanics, HVAC technicians, and commissioning agents required to build at the scale national security demands. This is a readiness issue. Just as we cannot fight a war without a trained infantry, we cannot win the AI race without a skilled industrial workforce. We need a national mobilization strategy to train the trades that underpin our digital sovereignty.
Real Power for Real Security
AI requires high-density, 24/7, always-on baseload power. America’s energy narrative drifts into fiction when it assumes renewables alone can shoulder national security infrastructure. While renewables are vital, they cannot single-handedly shoulder the burden of national security infrastructure. Wind and solar are intermittent and weather-dependent; AI workloads do not pause when the wind dies or the sun sets.
A fragile grid is not a strategy. If we want sovereign, resilient AI compute that can survive kinetic or cyber disruption, we must invest in new baseload generation. The path forward is nuclear energy, particularly Small Modular Reactors. These scalable, deployable reactors offer the density and reliability required by defense-grade AI. AI dominance requires power dominance. There is no strategy that bypasses this physics-based reality.
The Cost of Indifference
Critics raise grid stability or water usage as reasons to stall development. These are engineering challenges, not existential threats. Modern data centers increasingly stabilize the grid and can pair load with on-site generation and storage. The true existential threat is a world where Beijing sets AI standards, military applications, and logistics because they built the capacity while we debated it.
China remains the world’s largest polluter yet builds the world’s largest AI infrastructure atop a coal heavy grid, while exporting a “green” narrative they do not follow themselves. Beijing understands that this is a contest of industrial capacity. Pretending otherwise does not make us moral; it makes us vulnerable.
China is not waiting. China is not debating. China is building. The U.S. still has the innovators, capital, and the industrial DNA to win. But victory requires stripping away the regulatory theater and treating AI infrastructure as the national security imperative it is. We must build like our future depends on it, because it does.
