Government can’t keep the lights on. Americans can.



Winter storms this year didn’t just freeze roads. They exposed a harder truth: Government can no longer reliably perform the most basic functions of a modern society.

Across the country, public systems failed under predictable stress. In New York, snowstorms everyone saw coming left streets impassable for weeks. In Nashville, an ice storm knocked out power and left more than 100,000 people in the dark for days. In Washington, D.C., officials are still scrambling to contain the largest wastewater spill in city history, with repairs expected to take months.

The resilience America needs will not come from another government task force. It will come from policies that empower Americans to secure their own energy future.

These are not isolated mishaps. They are recurring failures — signs of national decay.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Americans endured an average of 11 hours of power outages in 2024. Eleven hours in the dark in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country on Earth. Reliability is slipping while electricity prices climb. Families pay more and get less, even as utility companies demand higher rates.

That path is unsustainable for families already stretched thin. It is dangerous for small businesses operating on razor-thin margins. And it is a strategic liability for a country competing with communist China in the AI race.

Artificial intelligence data centers consume electricity on a staggering scale. A single data center campus under construction in Texas is expected to use more power than the city of Chicago. If America intends to lead the world in AI — and defeat China in the defining competition of this century — it first must lead in energy production.

Yet Americans are asking an obvious question: If government can’t plow streets or keep a sewer system running, why should anyone trust it to keep the lights on?

The Trump administration is right to pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy. We have no choice but to build nuclear, expand natural gas, and unleash domestic production across the board. But large power plants take years — sometimes decades — to come online.

America needs more energy now.

The fastest, cheapest way to add flexible capacity is battery storage.

Home batteries can be bought off the shelf and installed in days. They can be charged by rooftop solar, small-scale generators, or power from the local utility. They store energy when supply is strong and release it when demand spikes. They keep homes running when the grid fails. And when thousands of them are networked together, they can function like a virtual power plant — pushing electricity back onto the grid to stabilize it during emergencies.

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Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

Instead of relying entirely on aging transmission lines and centralized monopoly utilities that repeatedly fail, Americans can build resilience at home and in their neighborhoods. Power generated and stored closer to where it is used means fewer cascading failures, less strain on fragile infrastructure, and a more reliable grid for everyone.

In other words, instead of waiting on distant bureaucracies, Americans can take ownership of their own energy security.

If government can no longer guarantee basic services, it should at least stop blocking the people who can help provide them. Regulators should remove barriers to battery deployment. Market rules that sideline distributed energy should be updated. And Big Tech companies demanding enormous new power loads should help fund home battery programs instead of shifting those costs onto working families.

The resilience America needs will not come from another government task force. It will come from policies that empower the people to secure their own energy future.

This winter delivered the warning. We cannot assume someone else will keep the lights on. But with the right policies, the American people can.

Your laptop is about to become a casualty of the AI grift



Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need.

The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.”

Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.

That framing ignores what is being sacrificed — and distorted — in the process.

Beyond the destruction of rural communities and the strain placed on national energy capacity, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized “AI factories,” chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.

Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.

Subsidies break the market

For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education — both heavily monopolized by government — the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for “personal computers and peripheral equipment” fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.

That era is ending.

AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.

Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics — especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations — are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.

This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.

Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300% as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.

The chip crunch

The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80% year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand — down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.

Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.

Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 — ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they’re working on.

Real innovation sidelined

The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.

This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing — only to be acquired by the Chinese!

This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms’ valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.

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Hype over utility

As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage — allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.

The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.

We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology — reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing — delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.

The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.

Nuclear Firm Working With Chinese Military Companies Pushes for $900 Million US Uranium Contract

On its face, Orano Federal Services, a North Carolina-based nuclear fuel cycle company, is a plausible partner for a $1 billion Department of Energy contract to produce uranium for America's nuclear plants. But the firm's parent company, the French majority state-owned Orano Group, also works with two Chinese military companies to boost Beijing's nuclear power industry, something experts and industry officials warn should disqualify the firm from receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars.

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Trump admin leaves Elon Musk's Grok, xAI off massive list of AI tech partners



Elon Musk's artificial intelligence platform has seemingly been left out of a government program to launch the technology forward.

On Monday, the White House announced a new project aimed at accelerating innovation and discovery to "solve the most challenging problems of this century."

'The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources.'

The new Genesis Mission is described by the Department of Energy as "a national initiative to build the world's most powerful scientific platform."

An executive order from the president titled "Launching the Genesis Mission" explained plans to integrate federal scientific datasets to train AI to test new hypotheses, automate research, and speed up the occurrence of scientific breakthroughs.

"The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization."

With Elon Musk making strides in 2025 with both the advancement of his Grok chatbot and its video generation model, Imagine, tech enthusiasts were shocked to find out that Musk's xAI was not on a list of partners for the project.

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The Department of Energy includes 55 companies on its lists of collaborators for Genesis, with xAI and Grok nowhere to be found.

Aside from the fact that Musk was a special government employee under the Trump administration, his exclusion is even more surprising given both the length and generic nature of the companies that are involved. Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft were announced as partners, as were AI companies like OpenAI and Scale AI.

It should be noted that company xLight, which is listed by the DOE, is not affiliated with Musk.

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"For [xAI] to not be a part of the Genesis Mission, it is not just an oversight, it would have to be an intentional omission," AI engineer Brian Roemmele wrote on X. "I spoke to someone on this project who asked for my input today, and it is the first thing I brought up. I am certain they will see the error made."

Blaze News contacted xAI for comment but did not receive an immediate reply. This article will be updated with any applicable response.

Whether a rift exists between Musk and the Trump administration is unclear, but the government seems steadfast in believing its mission is monumental in terms of importance, likening it to the World War II nuclear arms race.

"The world's most powerful scientific platform to ever be built has launched," the DOE claimed on its X account. "This Manhattan-Project-level leap will fundamentally transform the future of American science and innovation."

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'Reminiscent of the Manhattan Project': Trump administration launches massive next-gen AI program



As the AI arms race continues at breakneck pace, the United States is stepping up its game to stay on the cutting edge of information technology. To that end, the Trump administration is launching a new initiative: the Genesis Mission.

On Monday, the White House announced the creation of the Genesis Mission under the purview of the Department of Energy.

'The Genesis Mission marks a defining moment for the next era of American science.'

The Genesis Mission is described as a "national effort to accelerate the application of AI for transformative scientific discovery focused on pressing challenges."

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Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

More concretely, the Department of Energy has been ordered to "build an integrated AI platform to harness federal scientific datasets."

In its announcement on X, the Department of Energy said the Genesis Mission will be "reminiscent of the Manhattan Project and Apollo programs."

In the promotional video, the DOE suggested that this initiative is not unlike what visionaries such as G.W. Liebniz, Claude Shannon, and Alan Turing could have only dreamed of in their scientific endeavors to understand the world.

Dr. Dario Gil, undersecretary for science and Genesis Mission director, said in a press release: "The Genesis Mission marks a defining moment for the next era of American science. We are linking the nation's most advanced facilities, data, and computing into one closed-loop system to create a scientific instrument for the ages, an engine for discovery that doubles R&D productivity and solves challenges once thought impossible."

Energy Secretary Chris Wright explained the scope and goal of the project: "This Genesis Mission is going to bring together industry, the national labs, data sets all tied together in a closed-loop system to just rapidly advance the pace of scientific and engineering progress."

"It will be transformative," Wright added.

This announcement comes just months after the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, a comprehensive plan to win the global AI race.

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A Whistleblower Was Meeting With the SEC, Accusing a Solar Panel Company of Fraud. The Biden Admin Guaranteed a $3 Billion Loan for the Company at the Same Time.

A whistleblower accused one of the Biden administration's top energy loan recipients of maintaining a "hidden" set of financial records while defrauding investors and tax authorities. The Biden administration guaranteed a $3 billion loan to the company anyway, the Washington Free Beacon has learned through interviews and whistleblower reports.

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Trump Cancels $45M Green Energy Grant That Chuck Schumer Secured for His Donors

The Department of Energy is canceling a $45.7-million grant that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) helped secure for Plug Power, a green energy firm whose executives donated tens of thousands of dollars to his campaign, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

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Trump Admin Takes Ownership Stake in America's Largest Planned Lithium Mine

The Trump administration is moving forward with a Biden-era loan worth $2.23 billion for a massive Nevada lithium mine in exchange for a sizable equity stake in the project, saving the largest planned lithium mine in the United States.

The post Trump Admin Takes Ownership Stake in America's Largest Planned Lithium Mine appeared first on .

EXCLUSIVE: America’s Largest Lithium Project in Jeopardy After Top Energy Department Official Questions Its Ability To Compete With China

Department of Energy officials met in Washington, D.C., in early June with executives from Lithium Americas, the developer of Thacker Pass, a proposed project in northern Nevada that is the largest planned lithium mine in the United States.

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America First energy policy will be key to beating China in the AI race



The world is on the verge of a technological revolution unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Artificial intelligence is a defining force that will shape military power, economic growth, the future of medicine, surveillance, and the global balance of freedom versus authoritarianism — and whoever leads in AI will set the rules for the 21st century.

The stakes could not be higher. And yet while America debates regulations and climate policy, China is already racing ahead, fueled by energy abundance.

Energy abundance must be understood as a core national policy imperative — not just as a side issue for environmental debates.

When people talk about China’s strategy in the AI race, they usually point to state subsidies and investments. China’s command-economy structure allows the Chinese Communist Party to control the direction of the country’s production. For example, in recent years, the CCP has poured billions of dollars into quantum computing.

China’s energy edge

But another, more important story is at play: China is powering its AI push with a historic surge in energy production.

China has been constructing new coal plants at a staggering speed, accounting for 95% of new coal plants built worldwide in 2023. China just recently broke ground on what is being dubbed the “world’s largest hydropower dam.” These and other energy projects have resulted in massive growth in energy production in China in the past few decades. In fact, production climbed from 1,356 terawatt hours in 2000 to an incredible 10,073 terawatt hours in 2024.

Beijing understands what too many American policymakers ignore: Modern economies and advanced AI models are energy monsters. Training cutting-edge systems requires millions of kilowatt hours of power. Keeping AI running at scale demands a resilient and reliable grid.

China isn’t wringing its hands about carbon targets or ESG metrics. It’s doing what great powers do when they intend to dominate: They make sure nothing — especially energy scarcity — stands in their way.

America’s self-inflicted weakness

Meanwhile, in America, most of our leaders have embraced climate alarmism over common sense. We’ve strangled coal, stalled nuclear, and made it nearly impossible to build new power infrastructure. Subsidized green schemes may win applause at Davos, but they don’t keep the lights on. And they certainly can’t fuel the data centers that AI requires.

The demand for energy from the AI industry shows no sign of slowing. Developers are already bypassing traditional utilities to build their own power plants, a sign of just how immense the pressure on the grid has become. That demand is also driving up energy costs for everyday citizens who now compete with data centers for electricity.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has even spoken of plans to spend “trillions” on new data center construction. Morgan Stanley projects that global investment in AI-related infrastructure could reach $3 trillion by 2028.

Already, grid instability is a growing problem. Blackouts, brownouts, and soaring electricity prices are becoming a feature of American life. Now imagine layering the immense demand of AI on top of a fragile system designed to appease activists rather than strengthen a nation.

In the AI age, a weak grid equals a weak country. And weakness is something that authoritarian rivals like Beijing are counting on.

Time to hit the accelerator

Donald Trump has already done a tremendous amount of work to reorient America toward energy dominance. In the first days of his administration, he released detailed plans explicitly focused on “unleashing American energy,” signaling that the message is being taken seriously at the highest levels.

Over the past several months, Trump has signed numerous executive orders to bolster domestic energy production and end subsidies for unreliable energy sources. Most recently, the Environmental Protection Agency has moved to rescind the Endangerment Finding — a potentially massive blow to the climate agenda that has hamstrung energy production in the United States since the Obama administration.

These steps deserve a lot of credit and support. However, for America to remain competitive in the AI race, we must not only continue this momentum but ramp it up wherever possible. Energy abundance must be understood as a core national policy imperative — not just as a side issue for environmental debates.

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Photo by Grafissimo via Getty Images

Silicon Valley cannot out-innovate a blackout. However, Americans can’t code their way around an empty power plant. If China has both the AI models and the energy muscle to run them, while America ties itself in regulatory knots, the future belongs to China.

Liberty on the line

This is about more than technology. This is about the world we want to live in. An authoritarian China, armed with both AI supremacy and energy dominance, would have the power to bend the global order toward censorship, surveillance, and control.

If we want America to lead the future of artificial intelligence, then we must act now. The AI race cannot be won by Silicon Valley alone. It will be won only if America moves full speed ahead with abundant domestic energy production, climate realism, and universal access to affordable and reliable energy for all.