Donald Trump has declared the United States is going to “win” the artificial intelligence race, as his administration unveiled its AI Action Plan.
The new blueprint is designed to speed up the building of energy-intensive data centres – which run AI products – by loosening environmental rules, while also vastly expanding the sale of AI technologies overseas.
The plan, which includes 90 recommendations, comes as America attempts to maintain its edge over China, with both superpowers investing heavily in the industry to secure economic and military superiority.
It calls for the export of US AI software and hardware abroad, as well as urging the removal of “red tape” that could be seen as stopping the industry from flourishing.
In a speech in Washington DC, Mr Trump said: “America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I’m here today to declare that America is going to win it.”
He said the technological arms race with China was a fight that will define the 21st century.
The president added: “We also have to have a single federal standard, not 50 different states regulating this industry in the future.”
And he said at the ‘Winning the AI Race’ summit that “America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape”.
An expansion in exports of AI products could benefit AI chip makers Nvidia and AMD as well as AI model giants Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Facebook parent company Meta.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang attends the ‘Winning the AI Race’ summit in Washington DC. Pic: Reuters
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During his time in office, former president Joe Biden brought in restrictions on US exports of AI chips to China and other countries which America feared could divert the semiconductors to the Asian superpower.
Mr Trump rescinded Mr Biden’s executive order aimed at promoting competition, protecting consumers and ensuring AI was not used for misinformation.
He also rescinded Mr Biden’s so-called AI diffusion rule, which capped the amount of American AI computing capacity some countries were allowed to obtain via US AI chip imports.
The Trump plan also aims to block the government from doing business with tech companies unless they “ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias”.
Mr Trump’s AI czar, David Sacks, has been criticising “woke AI” for more than a year.
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Demand for power in the US is hitting record highs this year after nearly two decades of stagnation as the number of AI and cloud computing data centres expands across the country.
The tech industry has been pushing to loosen rules to get its computing facilities connected to power sources.
But the AI building boom has also led to more demand for fossil fuel production, which contributes to global warming.
