Building America’s AI Arsenal

Ben Van Roo

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Building America’s AI Arsenal: The Case for a National Computing Reserve

A Category 5 hurricane barrels toward the Gulf Coast. Unlike Helene and Milton, this time AI leads our response.

Within hours, it precisely predicts the storm's path, identifies vulnerable areas, and optimizes evacuation routes. Emergency responders are deployed with unprecedented efficiency. Lives are saved. Damage is minimized. This isn't just better disaster management—it's a revolution in saving lives.

On today's battlefield, commanders need AI-powered tools to process vast amounts of data and make split-second decisions. From processing sensor data to coordinating multi-domain operations, military leaders require unprecedented computing power at the tactical edge.

But to make this vision a reality, we need to act now. Three years ago, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy proposed a National Strategic Computing Reserve—a coalition ready to contribute massive computational power in times of national need. It was a good idea then. Today, it's an urgent necessity.

Why? Because in those three years, our need for compute power—the raw processing capability that drives our digital world—has exploded. AI has evolved at a blistering pace, turning once-futuristic capabilities like real-time language translation and complex strategic decision-making into everyday realities.

The numbers are staggering. Since 2018, the computational requirements for training large language models have doubled every six months. By 2023, the largest AI training runs were using over a million times more compute than a decade ago. And that's just for training. Running these models across countless real-time applications pushes demand even higher, straining our computational infrastructure to its limits.