White House AI Czar Outlines Industry’s Role in Global AI Race

The White House is relying on the private sector to advance the nation’s position in the AI race, White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said during a fireside chat on Tuesday with Dave Levy, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of worldwide public sector, at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C.

“The directive that President Trump gave us in his first week in office was that the U.S. has to win the AI race,” Sacks said.

Leveraging Private Sector Innovation

Sacks highlighted the three pillars that are crucial to the U.S. winning the AI race: innovation, infrastructure and a sustainable AI ecosystem. He added government needs to “let the industry cook” and drive innovation for the nation to stay ahead in AI development.

During his first week in office, President Trump rescinded a former President Joe Biden’s AI executive order that created “unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership,” according to a White House fact sheet.

“We have to ‘out-innovate’ the competition,” said Sacks. “The innovation is done by the private sector; it’s not done by the government. We need to be an enabler of the private sector.”

Increasing Energy Production to Power AI

Sacks said the private sector in Silicon Valley is growing the nation’s AI infrastructure, citing AWS’s recent announcement to build two new data centers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The Trump administration has stated it wants to expand the nation’s investments in nuclear energy to increase energy production to meet the growing demands of AI.

“We need to make it a lot easier to generate new electricity … these data centers are incredibly power hungry,” Sacks said. “Our grid has been more or less flat for the last decade … this administration is very committed to enabling new power generation, and we got to build, baby, build.”

Expanding Global Partnerships

The Trump administration also announced new partnerships with other countries to invest in American AI and energy. Trump toured the Gulf region in May and announced a partnership to boost “United Arab Emirates digital transformation while supporting U.S. research, engineering jobs and demand for American technologies.”

“We have to build out partnerships. We want the American technology stack to be broadly adopted. We want our technology to become the standard,” Sacks said. “If we … don’t allow [the Gulf states] to partner with us and participate in the bounties of AI … we’re basically going to push them into the arms of China.”

Creating a Pro-AI Workforce

Sacks emphasized the importance of industry and government buy-in when it comes to educating the workforce on AI opportunities and challenges. Government will see efficiency gains as employees better understand how and why they use AI tools, he added.

“We have to embrace that opportunity, to be more productive. Our workers need to know how to use AI and be creative with it,” said Sacks. “I don’t think that the right thing to do here is to throw up a wall and be so afraid of AI that we try to resist it.”