New Delhi: Even as the world tries to reorient its strategy on Donald Trump and his tariff bluster, the US President is busy silently building on his vision of global tech supremacy and autonomy, an analysis of a clutch of executive orders on Artificial Intelligence and boosting energy infra shows.
A detailed reading of the White House archives reveals that since 23 January this year—three days after he was sworn in as the 47th US President—Trump has signed executive orders on de-regulating the AI sector, scaling up manufacturing, exporting tech, reducing “wokeness” in superintelligence and educating the American youth on it.
While he signed five executive orders directly linked to AI, at least three others were also ratified by the White House to shore up these proposals. Three of the five direct orders were signed on 23 July, stemming from the White House’s AI Action Plan Trump unveiled earlier that day.
The executive orders illustrate how Trump is trying to revolutionise the energy sector, build sprawling high-tech facilities, catch the fancy of young Americans and build a larger alliance with the so-called “tech bros”, all rolled into one as his golden ticket to a new-age supremacy.
Other than bypassing a behemoth regulatory framework in one sweep, the 79-year-old has also ramped up engagement with tech leaders and investors in their 30s and 40s to appeal to a powerful tech lobby controlled largely by millennials. Whether this could become Trump’s Reaganesque silver bullet is still to be seen.
“Breakthroughs in these fields (of AI) have the potential to reshape the global balance of power… As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the US to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” Trump said as he launched the AI Action Plan on 23 July.
The 28-page document did not shy away from directly naming China as the adversary. “American energy capacity has stagnated since the 1970s while China has rapidly built out their grid. America’s path to AI dominance depends on changing this troubling trend,” it said. The White House said its AI Action Plan is based on three pillars – accelerating innovation, building AI infra, and leading the international diplomacy and security space.
To set the ball rolling on realising this dominance, Trump made the first move just days after taking office. On 23 January, he reversed a 2023 executive order by his predecessor Joe Biden, who sought to “reduce risks” AI posed to national security. Biden’s order had directed AI systems to share results of safety tests with the US government, a move seen by many as limiting the race for superintelligence supremacy. The action plan shows the White House is now trying to deregulate the ballooning sector.
“This order revokes certain existing AI policies and directives that act as barriers to American AI innovation, clearing a path for the US to act decisively to retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,” the executive order titled ‘Removing barriers to American leadership in Artificial Intelligence’ said. An executive order gives the US President power over the government under Article II of the US Constitution.
Though Trump repealed Biden’s order, they appeared to agree about one thing–the urgent need for massive energy sources to fuel superintelligence computing systems. Biden had vowed to address this requirement for fast-growing AI data centres in a separate executive order. Trump left it untouched.
And to this effect, the US President issued another executive order, possibly the most important of the three he signed on 23 July. Titled ‘Accelerating federal permitting of data centre infrastructure’, it addressed the need for vast sources of energy to fuel the GPU-powered sprawling facilities.
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Making computing power great again
Generative AI, which is expected to see a spending of about $400 billion by tech giants just this fiscal, needs massive computing power to keep churning millions of query responses every day. This computing power comes from GPUs.
A GPU, which is short for Graphics Processing Unit, is an electronic circuit that was originally designed to revolutionise the creation of visuals. However, its ability to perform massive numbers of calculations quickly has led to its adoption in AI systems.
“(Our) plans include AI data centres and infrastructure that powers them, including high‑voltage transmission lines and other equipment. It will be a priority of my administration to facilitate the rapid and efficient buildout of this infrastructure by easing federal regulatory burdens,” Trump’s executive order said.
Adding, “In addition, my administration will utilise federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centres.” According to it, natural gas turbines and coal, nuclear and geothermal power equipment would be used to serve the data centre projects.
While a vast amount of electricity is needed to power these systems, water-based cooling mechanisms are also crucial in controlling the intense heat the high-performance machines generate. Tech companies such as Meta and OpenAI have already started locating their data centres in places where electricity and water are most accessible.
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that his company will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centres. Two of these–Prometheus and Hyperion–will soon be a reality, he said. The amount of electricity these centres would need is more than what some small countries run on.
After Meta launched a $750-million data centre near Newton County in Georgia, the water taps in several homes ran dry, according to an investigative report by The New York Times. It said that within a year of the company breaking ground, the water pressure had reduced to a trickle. And soon, nothing came out of the taps.
Amid some pockets of concern on such a drastic need of resources, the US-based tech giants appear to have a clear and strong support of the Trump administration. In a column for The Economist, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright noted that AI transforms electricity into the “most valuable output imaginable, which is intelligence”. He said the federal government will accelerate the production of energy for these projects from coal, nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas.
Trump is ‘all-in’
Trump’s inclination towards AI supremacy is also evident in his consistent outreach to tech leaders. Just recently, he appeared on a YouTube podcast called “All-In”, which is hosted by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and three others–David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis. The four tech investors discuss and debate AI, tech and economy, and have built influence not just in Silicon Valley, but also in Washington; to the extent that Trump also headlined one of their summits as a guest.
Which brings into the picture how Trump is thinking about business around AI and engaging with tech leaders and geopolitical partners. One of the three pillars of the US action plan is exporting American AI technology to the world to build a global alliance against growing Chinese dominance.
“AI is a foundational technology that will define the future of economic growth, national security, and global competitiveness… The United States must not only lead in developing general-purpose and frontier AI capabilities, but also ensure that American AI technologies, standards, and governance models are adopted worldwide to strengthen relationships with our allies and secure our continued technological dominance,” the order titled ‘Promoting the export of the American AI technology stack’ said.
With this, the US aims to “decrease international dependence on AI technologies developed by our adversaries”.
To no one’s surprise, China is busy building its own ecosystem for AI dominance with emphasis on self-reliance and global influence. It has already formalised several regulatory frameworks, including rules on deepfakes and algorithm guidelines. Way back in 2017, it announced a programme for domestic development of AI technology, with the aim of becoming a “major innovation centre by 2030”.
It is also laying the groundwork for building domestic chip capacity and massive training data systems. Surprisingly, on 11 August Trump indicated he could allow Nvidia, the leader in manufacturing AI chips, to sell a restricted version of its GPU chips in China.
Trump’s second executive order issued on 23 July said that within three months, the US Secretary of Commerce would consult with the Secretary of State and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to implement the American AI export programme. It stressed on “full-stack AI export packages” being shared with allies and partners.
According to the order, a full-stack package would include AI-optimised computer hardware (chips, servers, and accelerators), data centre storage, cloud services, and networking equipment. It said steps will also be taken to ensure the security and cybersecurity of AI models and systems.
The order makes it evident that Trump’s vision for a path to AI supremacy goes through allies and partner nations. In the order, he said specific target countries and regional blocs will be identified for export discussions and diplomatic resources will be used to accelerate deployment of AI assets.
Importantly, the order also said that technical barriers to trade will be taken into account for the success of the US policy. Trump recently said he planned to introduce 100 percent tariffs on semiconductor chip imports.
Thwarting ‘woke’ AI
While these orders focused on the technical and technological aspect of the US’s AI ambition, a third order issued on 23 July hinged on the US President’s all-out war on ‘wokeness’ and DEI.
Titled ‘Preventing woke AI in the federal government’, it said: “Americans will require reliable outputs from AI, but when ideological biases or social agendas are built into AI models, they can distort the quality and accuracy of the output.”
“One of the most pervasive and destructive of these ideologies is so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI). In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex,” the order said.
DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favour of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI, it added.
The order also used an example to back its stated objective. It said that one major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures—including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings—when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritise DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy.
According to the order, Trump vowed to procure only those AI systems that were truthful in responding to users seeking factual information. He said that they must prioritise historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and must acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.
Apart from these crucial executive orders from 23 July, Trump also signed one earlier in April. It said that there was an urgent need to provide the American youth opportunities to cultivate the understanding of AI technology. And this, too, was aimed at global autonomy. “We can ensure that every American has the opportunity to learn about AI from the earliest stages of their educational journey through postsecondary education, fostering a culture of innovation and critical thinking that will solidify our nation’s leadership in the AI-driven future,” it said.
While these five orders were directly targeted at trying to revolutionise the American AI sector, multiple others appeared to feed into the requirements this cutting-edge technology will have over time.
Two of them, ‘Strengthening the reliability and security of the United States electric grid’ and ‘Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry’, focussed on the recurring theme in the American thinking on AI–feeding electricity for energy-hungry data centres.
“The United States is experiencing an unprecedented surge in electricity demand driven by rapid technological advancements, including the expansion of artificial intelligence data centres… This increase in demand, coupled with existing capacity challenges, places a significant strain on our nation’s electric grid,” one of the orders said.
It added that the US’s ability to remain at the forefront of AI innovation will depend on the integrity of the American electricity grid.
A third supplemental order said that the US will identify “opportunities to invest in the upskilling of incumbent workers to meet rapidly evolving skill demands of their industries, including the use of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace.”
While there’s no unambiguity in Trump’s remarks on achieving complete control of AI powers, experts say the White House AI Action Plan could run counter to his vision, even if unwittingly.
Some experts also say that while the White House’s action plan has laid out the larger contours of what the Trump administration plans on semiconductors, energy infra and AI tech exports, the lack of specifics and global confusion around tariffs could hamper its implementation. They also say that greater convergence is needed with AI pioneers such as OpenAI, Meta, Google and xAI to ensure policy consensus.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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