America’s push to win the AI race is losing the public support it needs to build anything, argue Edgerunner Ventures founder Ryan Cunningham and China AI policy researcher Kristy Loke in an op-ed for The Information. They cite local opposition that stalled about $130 billion worth of data center projects in the first quarter and a poll in which 71% of Americans opposed one being built near them. Silicon Valley’s pitch of post-labor abundance and Washington’s fear of losing to China both fail to tell people how AI will improve their lives, they write, whereas China weighs frontier research against industrial adoption and public well-being. Their fix is to give communities a say in infrastructure planning, prepare workers for displacement and show that the benefits will be broadly shared.
