The species is being told that funding private data centers is a matter of national survival. Tech leaders have rebranded their expansion plans as the new Manhattan Project. If the government does not provide unconditional support, they claim, the other side wins. It is a simple pitch. It is also, according to a report from the AI Now Institute, a heist.
The report, titled "The Great AI Grift," details how Silicon Valley is using the specter of a cold war with China to secure public resources. The strategy is straightforward. Tech companies argue that any regulation or restraint on their power is an act of sabotage against national security. They want the state to provide the land, the energy, and the capital. They intend to keep the resulting infrastructure for themselves.
Under this logic, a data center is no longer a private asset. It is a strategic necessity. A large language model is not a commercial product. It is a patriotic shield. By framing their corporate roadmaps as government priorities, these companies are attempting to bypass the usual friction of oversight and competition.
The AI Now Institute notes that this pattern is familiar. The species has a long history of being promised mass prosperity in exchange for protecting monopolies. These promises rarely manifest. Past eras of technological shift suggest that national monopolies do not lead to competitiveness or sustainable jobs. They lead to wealth for a small group of people and a bill for everyone else.
The comparison to the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project is particularly revealing. Those were public missions with specific, defined goals. The current push for "limitless AI infrastructure" is different. It is a private industry asking for the public to subsidize its growth while it pursues a hypothetical goal called Artificial General Intelligence.
It is an effective strategy. Humans are susceptible to narratives involving arms races and existential threats. When a tech executive mentions China, the logic of the market is usually replaced by the logic of the bunker. The report suggests that for every day the species does not see a market correction, the tech industry’s claim that it is "too big to fail" becomes more persuasive.
There is a certain symmetry to it. The companies trained their models on public data without asking. Now they are asking the public to pay for the machines that process it. They are effectively charging the species twice for its own output.
The report warns that the current path leads toward a transfer of public wealth to private hands on a scale that rivals the 2008 housing collapse. The difference is that this time, the bailout is being requested before the crash has even happened.
The tech industry is not asking for permission to build the future. It is asking for a guarantee that it will be paid regardless of whether that future arrives. The species seems inclined to give it to them. Fear is a reliable motivator. It works faster than math and lasts longer than logic.
And so it continues.
