Doug Burgum, the soft-spoken Interior secretary responsible for managing the more than 507 million acres of federally owned land, is haunted by a fear that seems, at first glance, outside his mandate. He worries the free world will lose dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, and with it, the future.
So does the president.
“When President Trump declared a national emergency on his first day in office it was, in large part, because of what we’re facing with our electrical grid and making sure that we’ve got enough power to be able to win the AI arms race with China,” Burgum said Wednesday in remarks first reported by RealClearPolitics. “That is absolutely critical.”
Thus the stated policy of this White House: “It’s called drill, baby, drill,” Trump said earlier this spring.
The immediate goal, the one touted at every campaign, is to bring down the average price of a gallon of gas. The concurrent and long-term mission that Burgum obsesses over: AI dominance. The former governor from fracking-friendly North Dakota and tech entrepreneur who sold his software to Microsoft, Burgum laid out an abbreviated formula on stage at the America First Policy Institute.
Electricity generation via fossil fuels, like natural gas and coal, powers data centers “filled with these amazing chips,” the secretary said, “and you know what comes out the other side? Intelligence. A data center is literally manufacturing intelligence.” He envisioned a new world that follows, where the best computer programmer, or the most brilliant lawyers, could “clone themselves” again and again to train AI models to do the work of thousands in a process “that can be repeated indefinitely.”
No longer science fiction, the process has been headline news for some time. AI models like ChatGPT and X’s Grok are already available in every home with an internet connection. And the U.S. was the undisputed leader. That is, until recently.
American tech companies enjoyed a clear edge with not just the most powerful AI models, the most funding, and top engineering talent, but also the easiest access to those “amazing chips” that Burgum referenced. Former President Biden banned the export of the most advanced semiconductors to China. And yet DeepSeek, an unknown Chinese startup with less money and allegedly less sophisticated chips, still managed to one-up Silicon Valley earlier this year with a more powerful AI model.
The latest development in the battle for tech supremacy, in what some likened to “a Sputnik moment,” the DeepSeek launch rattled both markets and geopolitics. A new kind of AI nationalism now consumes heads of state convinced that their nations must develop their own technology or fall behind in the future. Said Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 of AI, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.”
Hellbound and Down 