Three Years to Rebuild the Internet or Lose the AI Race

When the United States built railroads, power grids and interstate highways, it didn’t just expand the old infrastructure — it created entirely new ones. Each leap unleashed decades of growth, strengthened national security and cemented America’s role as a global leader. 

AI presents a similar dramatic inflection point. But the telecom infrastructure we are relying on — the public internet and today’s version of cloud computing — was never designed for the scale, speed and security AI will require. As I outlined in my recent white paper [Cloud 2.0: Because AI Won’t Run on Yesterday’s Internet], unless we act now, the U.S. risks ceding technological and economic leadership to those who solve this challenge first. 

Cloud 1.0, built for SaaS and e-commerce applications, cannot carry the industrial-scale AI workloads already emerging. AI “factories” are being constructed to train and retrain models around the clock, moving ...