China is building power. America is still debating it.



The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced that it is turning old federal land — including Cold War uranium sites, closed military facilities, and other public parcels — into part of the physical backbone of America’s artificial intelligence buildout, pairing new data centers with the power generation needed to run them. The projects could also create new domestic jobs.

Critics will focus on the benefits to big technology companies. The larger issue is harder to dismiss: Energy security is national security. The country that can build and power the next generation of AI infrastructure will hold an enormous economic and strategic advantage.

Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

That means the United States cannot afford an ideological energy policy. Whether the resource is natural gas, nuclear power, solar, battery storage, or the critical minerals needed to build advanced technologies, domestic supply should be treated as a strategic asset.

AI is already changing the scale of America’s power needs. Data centers alone could soon consume as much electricity as the entire country of Malaysia. Advanced manufacturing is returning to American soil and will require still more reliable power.

The military is modernizing with increasingly energy-intensive technology as well. As retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General David Deptula argued in the Washington Post, data itself has become a strategic military asset. The countries that lead the next generation of AI will need more than talented engineers and sophisticated algorithms. They will need the infrastructure to power the entire ecosystem.

China understands this. Beijing has spent years pursuing an aggressive all-of-the-above energy strategy. It continues to build coal plants while investing heavily in solar, nuclear power, hydropower, and battery storage. Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

The Energy Department’s plan is therefore a timely step. It creates opportunities to pair new power generation with the infrastructure that will consume it. But if America intends to win the AI race, policymakers across the political spectrum will have to go further and remove unnecessary obstacles to new energy supply.

Solar power, for example, has been the fastest-growing source of new U.S. electricity generation for five years running. In 2025, the United States added 43 gigawatts of new solar capacity, enough to power over 32 million homes. Where permitting and regulatory barriers needlessly delay viable projects, Washington should remove them.

RELATED: Water, watts, and workers: 3 persistent myths about AI and data centers

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The same urgency should apply to critical minerals. The United States has spent years allowing dependence on foreign supply chains to deepen even as minerals became indispensable to batteries, electronics, defense systems, and energy infrastructure. Domestic mining and processing cannot expand at the speed national security demands if projects spend years trapped in permitting and regulatory limbo.

This is not an argument for replacing traditional energy with newer technologies. It is an argument for abundance. Oil and gas remain essential. Nuclear power can provide large amounts of reliable electricity. Solar and storage can add capacity quickly in the right places. Critical minerals underpin all of them. The strategic question is not which source wins an ideological contest. It is whether America can produce enough energy, reliably and affordably, to meet the demands ahead.

China is already acting on that logic. The United States should do the same. The next phase of economic and military competition will be shaped not only by who invents the best technology, but by who can build the plants, mines, transmission, data centers, and generation needed to deploy it at scale.

The Energy Department’s announcement is a good start. Now we need to make abundance the policy: build more, permit faster, secure domestic supply chains, and stop treating energy sources as political footballs.

America will need all the reliable energy it can produce, however we can produce it. The country that powers the future will have a much better chance of leading it.

EXCLUSIVE: Congress Moves To Prohibit Foreign Adversaries From Accessing Sensitive US National Labs, Citing Counterintelligence Threat

Congress is taking up new legislation that would bar Chinese, Russian, Iranian, North Korean, and Cuban nationals from accessing all U.S. national laboratories in the latest attempt by lawmakers to stop adversarial nations from stealing sensitive U.S. technology and research, according to a copy of the bill exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

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Doc dump reveals top secret Bill Gates clearance during COVID years



Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says that Bill Gates had a "private editor" who worked at the National Institutes of Health.

At the same time, Paul released documents that point to Gates having the highest level of access at the Department of Energy as well as getting insider briefings from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

'Is this coordinated in some way, or is Bill going rogue?'

Known as "Q" clearance, the DOE classification is the department's rough equivalent to Top-Secret National Security Information clearance for access to Restricted Data, the DOE's special category of classified information.

In a huge document dump as part of his ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19, Paul showed that Gates held the clearance for seven years, "including during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic."

The period spanned from June 11, 2014, to December 6, 2021; those dates were provided to Paul in a June 30 letter from the DOE.

Further documents revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci served as Gates' "private editor," with Gates requesting Fauci's feedback on a memo in April 2020. The memo was titled "Pandemic I: The First Modern Pandemic," which "set out how Gates was thinking about the COVID pandemic."

Gates later asked Fauci to edit his book "How to Prevent the Next Pandemic."

Another item in the released files stated that DARPA had given the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a private briefing on four military biological threat programs. This included a 90-minute session on programs like PREEMPT, which has a stated aim of "targeting viruses in animals before they emerge in humans."

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Much of the revelations were in regard to the Gates Foundation (formerly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and its ties to the federal government.

"When the NIH director urgently asked what his agency's ties to the Gates Foundation were, the answer came back that the foundation had been funding pieces of NIH," the documents explained. An internal review at the NIH included that the foundation had "funded various components of NIH."

Gates' influence even led him to making suggestions to the president at the White House. In 2018, NIH Director Francis Collins reported that Gates met with President Biden in the Oval Office to discuss promoting a universal flu vaccine.

Collins allegedly asked, "Is this coordinated in some way, or is Bill going rogue?"

RELATED: Diaries expose Fauci obsessing over his own fame during height of COVID as millions died

J. David Ake/Getty Images

As further evidence of the Gates Foundation being intertwined with federal agencies, Paul said at the end of July that Collins told Gates' wife that much of his tenure had been spent bringing the NIH and the foundation closer together.

In October 2021, just after announcing his resignation, Collins wrote:

"It has been a privilege to work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over these 12 years, and I am glad to have had the chance to bring our global health efforts even closer together than ever."

Paul was clear, summarizing the relationship between Gates and the NIH as one that included "personal access" to the federal government.

"Bill Gates had a Q Clearance and a private editor at NIH. Across nearly 20 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation built a relationship with the federal government that ran on personal access as much as formal partnership."

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Trump Energy Department To Provide $17.5B for Large-Scale Nuclear Power Projects as Demand Skyrockets

The Trump Department of Energy will issue loans worth a total of $17.5 billion to help fund 10 new nuclear power reactors nationwide, administration officials said on Tuesday.

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EXCLUSIVE: Trump Administration Forcing Big Changes to $1.7 Billion in Biden-Era Auto Grants, Scaling Back Electric Vehicle Production and Boosting Hybrids

The Trump Department of Energy is restructuring $1.7 billion in Biden-era grants that were designed to coax major automakers to convert their factories into electric vehicle plants, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. The funding will now be used to increase the production of hybrid vehicles and other advanced car technology.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Trump Administration Forcing Big Changes to $1.7 Billion in Biden-Era Auto Grants, Scaling Back Electric Vehicle Production and Boosting Hybrids appeared first on .

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.

RELATED: How Americans can prepare for the worst — before it’s too late

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.

RELATED: China’s AI strategy could turn Americans into data mines

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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.

The post Nuclear Firm Working With Chinese Military Companies Pushes for $900 Million US Uranium Contract appeared first on .

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.

RELATED: Big Tech’s AI boom hits voters hard — and Democrats pounce

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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."

RELATED: Trump’s AI plan prioritizes innovation over regulation

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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