"Tech leaders from OpenAI, Google, and Meta are funding super PACs with millions to secure lighter AI rules ahead of 2026 midterms, clashing with state efforts and safety advocates in a battle for U.S. innovation dominance," writes Miles Bennett of WebProNews.
The amount of cash tech giants are throwing around is over $200 million and is directed primarily at federal races, but some state politicians are also being targeted. AI regulation at the state level could stifle innovation, according to some tech companies. OpenAI, Meta, and Google are gearing up for battles against state rules, fearing they will retard growth, as Bloomberg outlines.
Some tech giants adopted voluntary safety frameworks in 2023 that didn't satisfy most pro-AI safety non-profits. However, even with the threat of a stock bubble staring most of the big tech investors in the face, spending to build out computing power and AI infrastructure will hit $1 trillion in 2026, according to Medium. "A recent study by McKinsey & Co. concluded that data centers will require $6.7 trillion worldwide to keep pace with demand for computing power," writes Matt Taibbi.
These data centers and AI language labs need massive amounts of water and power. How will this energy usage impact the American consumer? Can we build out AI infrastructure without destroying the economy for the rest of us?
The combination of big tech firms racing to make money in any way possible by using artificial intelligence with the potential pitfalls and disasters that could befall humanity, without a great deal of thought going into where the danger points might lie, suggests that we need to slow down, take stock, and act intelligently.
"In true bubble fashion, the race today is not to build useful products, but to attract the attention of investors, largely by beating competitors at specialized benchmarks only vaguely related to real-world scenarios," writes Persuasion's Jerry Kaplan.
If they're not building "useful products," why the gold rush?
Why are the world’s smartest companies acting like desperate gamblers doubling down at a casino? The answer lies in three words: Winner Takes All.
Each major player faces their own nightmare scenario. Microsoft fears Google achieving AGI first, making Office and Windows obsolete overnight. Google fears OpenAI reaching superintelligence, making Search irrelevant. Meta fears Apple or Microsoft controlling the AI layer, cutting social media off from users. Apple, arriving late to the party, fears becoming the next BlackBerry. Amazon worries Microsoft’s AI could commoditize AWS.
Each company knows that in the AI endgame, there might only be room for one king. The rest become vassals, or worse, irrelevant.
The endgame may include more government regulation, but not until some kind of reckoning occurs from a financial standpoint. Given the massive amounts of cash being spent on a daily basis (OpenAI Burns through $1.4 million every day), something somewhere is going to have to give.
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The "bubble" is only one aspect of a larger problem with AI.
The industry prefers not to discuss several uncomfortable realities. What if throwing money at the problem doesn’t work? Unlike Moore’s Law for semiconductors, there’s no guarantee that ten times more compute equals ten times smarter AI. The relationship might be logarithmic or might plateau entirely.
What happens to the losers in this race? Companies spending $50 billion or more might end up with nothing but depreciated GPUs and empty data centers. At current burn rates, even $900 billion in combined reserves gives the industry only two to three years of runway.
Is any of this sustainable? OpenAI loses money on every query. Anthropic has no path to profitability. Google’s AI erodes its search margins. Where exactly is the business model that justifies this spending?
My gut feeling is that big tech is the next economic sector to think of itself as "too big to fail." And it is. The tech companies know that the economy cannot afford to see them go under or lose trillions of dollars in stock value. That's exactly what will happen when the grandiose profit projections upon which all of the hundreds of billions of dollars in investments are based fall massively short of expectations.
The question is, will politicians end up walking the plank to save the riverboat gamblers and give them a bailout or play it politically safe and watch them — and the American economy — go under?
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