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Arm’s quarter shows how it’s carving a lucrative path in the crowded CPU resurgence

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:28:44 +0000

China’s EV price war turns into AI arms race beyond cheaper cars

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Fri, 01 May 2026 05:32:46 +0000

AI signage at the Robert Bosch booth at the Beijing Auto Show in Beijing, China, on Saturday, April 25, 2026.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — Electric carmakers in China are layering on more of the same artificial intelligence features as they try to survive a prolonged price war in the world’s largest auto market.

The competition has shifted over the last few years, from extending battery range to rolling out driver-assist systems and using more powerful automotive chips. Now, automakers are focusing on a suite of in-car AI features.

More than 50 car brands now use ByteDance’s Doubao AI model, the company’s cloud platform Volcano Engine announced last Friday at the Beijing auto show, where the tech unit had a booth next to robotaxi company Pony.ai.

That means Doubao is in 145 car models and over 7 million vehicles, Volcano Engine said. Besides domestic vehicles, Doubao AI has also been integrated in new foreign-branded models, such as the all-electric Mercedes-Benz GLC, the SAIC Audi E7X and the SAIC Volkswagen ID. ERA 9X.

“We will keep on integrating new features faster,” Fermín Soneira, CEO of the Audi and SAIC Cooperation Project, told reporters this month ahead of the auto show. He noted how automakers can quickly deploy tech updates remotely, or “over-the-air.”

Despite the rapid rollout of new features, automakers face persistent pressure on sales.

“It’s going to remain tough, because the capacity is there,” he said. “This price war is not going to really stop in the next month.”

The shift towards AI reflects consumer demand for connected features, including Huawei-smartphone-compatible interfaces or voice-based assistants such as Doubao.

ByteDance’s Doubao is by far the most widely used AI chatbot in China, with more than 155 million weekly active users as of early this year, according to consultancy Chozan. Volcano Engine’s auto show booth included demos of both Chinese-language and English-language AI systems for cars.

The price war has turned into a feature war around cockpit technology, said Stephen Dyer, partner and managing director and head of AlixPartners’ Asia automotive and industrials consulting practice.

The challenge is, however, that much of that technology soon becomes similar, making it harder for companies to stand out.

Among the top 20 best-selling electric car models in China, those priced at 100,000 yuan ($14,645) or above offered similar driver-assist and in-car entertainment functions, according to AlixPartners.

With “technology, they’re going to have to race and keep racing, because it disseminates so quickly that you’re never going to be able to sustain a differentiated technology for long,” Dyer said.

Instead, he expects Chinese companies to start competing more on the “outside-of-the-car experience,” similar to luxury brands that offer exclusive lifestyle experiences.

Chinese automaker Nio, for example, offers its customers exclusive access to products and clubhouses, on top of vehicles featuring premium interior materials.

The Chinese electric car company has struggled with the cost of offering such perks and slower market growth. But Nio claimed last week its ES8 is the first car model in the industry’s 400,000 yuan-and-above segment to deliver 100,000 units in just 215 days.

Video: Is the Nuclear Arms Control Era Over?

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:14:31 +0000

The last major nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia just expired. Our national security correspondent David E. Sanger explains how we got here.

By David E. Sanger, Coleman Lowndes, Nikolay Nikolov, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, Thomas Vollkommer, Laura Salaberry and Whitney Shefte

February 5, 2026

OpenAI’s historic week has redefined the AI arms race for investors: ‘I don’t see this as crazy’

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 11:50:06 +0000

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman listens to questions at a Q&A following a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

This week, OpenAI redefined what momentum — and risk — look like in the artificial intelligence arms race.

Now comes the hard part: Executing on CEO Sam Altman’s multitrillion-dollar vision.

In a rapid-fire series of announcements, the company unveiled partnerships involving mind-bending sums of money and cemented its place at the center of the next wave of machine learning infrastructure.

It began Monday with news that Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion to help OpenAI build data center capacity with millions of graphics processing units, or GPUs. A day later, OpenAI revealed an expanded deal with Oracle and SoftBank, scaling its “Stargate” project to a $400 billion commitment across multiple phases and sites. Then on Thursday, OpenAI deepened its enterprise reach with a formal integration into Databricks — signaling a new phase in its push for commercial adoption.

“In all, this is the biggest tale yet of Silicon Valley’s signature ‘fake it ’til you make it,’ and so far it seems to be working,” said Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson.

The startup, known mostly for its ChatGPT chatbot and GPT family of large language models, is trying to become something much bigger: the next hyperscaler. Never mind that it’s burning billions of dollars in cash and is fully reliant on outside capital to grow, nor that its buildout plans require the amount of energy that would be needed to power more than 13 million U.S. homes.

Altman has long said that delivering the next era of AI will require exponentially more infrastructure.

“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” he told CNBC and a small group of reporters over dinner in San Francisco last month. “And you should expect a bunch of economists wringing their hands, saying, ‘This is so crazy, it’s so reckless,’ and we’ll just be like, ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.'”

The story OpenAI is selling is that it’s responding to market demand, which shows no signs of stopping. And eventually, the thinking goes, this will all be profitable.

Current financial projections show OpenAI is on track to generate $125 billion in revenue by 2029, according to a source familiar with the company’s internal forecasts.

It’s a bold bet — and one full of execution risk.

Building out 17 gigawatts of capacity would require the equivalent of about 17 nuclear power plants, each of which takes at least a decade to build. The OpenAI team says talks are underway with hundreds of infrastructure providers across North America, but there are no firm answers yet.

The U.S. grid is already strained, gas turbines are sold out through 2028, nuclear is slow to deploy, and renewables are tied up in political roadblocks.

“I am extremely bullish about nuclear, advanced fission, fusion,” Altman said. “We should build more … a lot more of the current generation of fission plants, given the needs for dense, dense energy.”

What did crystallize this week, however, was the scale of Altman’s ambition, as the OpenAI CEO began to put hard numbers behind his vision — some of them staggering.

“Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required, and this is a small sample of it,” Altman said Tuesday at OpenAI’s first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas.

That mentality — blunt, ambitious, and dismissive of convention – has defined Altman’s leadership in this new phase.

Deedy Das, partner at Menlo Ventures, said the scale of OpenAI’s infrastructure partnerships with Oracle may seem extreme to some, but he views it differently.

“I don’t see this as crazy. I see it as existential for the race to superintelligence,” he said.

Das argued that data and compute, or computing power, are the two biggest levers for scaling AI, and praised Altman for recognizing early on just how steep the ramp in infrastructure would need to be.

“One of his gifts is reading the exponential and planning for it,” he added.

History shows that breakthroughs in AI aren’t driven by smarter algorithms, he added, but by access to massive computing power. That’s why companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are all chasing scale.

Alibaba, OpenAI and Anthropic have all pointed to insatiable demand for their models from consumers and businesses alike. As these companies push to embed AI into everyday workflows, the infrastructure stakes keep rising.

Ubiquitous, always-on intelligence requires more than just code — it takes power, land, chips, and years of planning.

“I think people who use ChatGPT every day have no idea that this is what it takes,” Altman said, gesturing to the site in Abilene. “This is 10% of what the site is going to be. We’re doing 10 of these.”

“This requires such an insane amount of physical infrastructure to deliver,” he said.

The cost of staying ahead

Though the buildout is flashy, the funding behind it remains hazy.

Nvidia’s $100 billion investment will arrive in $10 billion tranches over the next several years. OpenAI’s buildout commitment with Oracle and SoftBank could eventually reach $400 billion.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest partner and shareholder that holds a right of first refusal for cloud deals, “is not willing to write them an unlimited check for compute,” Luria said. “So they’ve turned to Oracle with a commitment considerably bigger than they can live up to.”

As a non-investment-grade startup without positive cash flow, OpenAI still faces a major financing challenge.

Executives have called equity “the most expensive” way to fund infrastructure, and the company is preparing to take on debt to cover the rest of its buildout. Nvidia’s long-term lease structure could help OpenAI secure better terms from banks, but it still needs to raise multiples of that capital in the private markets.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company plans to build some of its own first-party infrastructure — not to replace partners like Oracle, but to become a savvier operator. Doing some of the work internally, she said, makes OpenAI “a better partner” by allowing it to challenge vendor assumptions and gain a clearer view into actual costs versus padded estimates.

That, in turn, strengthens its position in rate negotiations.

“The other tool at their disposal to reduce burn rate is to start selling ads within ChatGPT, which may also help with the fundraising,” Luria suggested.

Altman said earlier this year in an interview with Ben Thompson’s Stratechery that he’d rather test affiliate-style fees than traditional ads, floating a 2% cut when users buy something they discovered through the tool. He said rankings wouldn’t be for sale and that while ads aren’t ruled out, other monetization models come first.

That question of how to monetize becomes even more urgent amid OpenAI’s breakneck growth.

“We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before,” Altman said, adding that demand is accelerating so quickly that even this buildout pace will “look slow” in hindsight. Usage of ChatGPT, he noted, has surged roughly tenfold over the past 18 months, particularly on the enterprise side.

And that demand isn’t slowing.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet told CNBC’s Sara Eisen on “Money Movers” Thursday that she’s seeing an inflection point in enterprise adoption.

“Every CEO board in the C-suite recognizes that advanced AI is critical to the future,” she said. “The challenge right now they’re facing is that they’re really excited about the technology, and they’re not yet AI-ready — for most companies.”

She said her firm signed 37 clients this quarter with bookings over $100 million.

“We’re still in the thick of it,” she added. “There’s a ton of work to do.”

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, said Thursday that concerns about overbuilding miss the bigger picture.

“There’s going to be much more AI usage in the future than we have today. There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “Not every person on the planet is using at the fullest capacity these AI models. So more capacity will be needed.”

That optimism is one reason Ghodsi struck a formal integration deal with OpenAI this week — a partnership that brings GPT-5 directly into Databricks’ data tooling and reflects growing enterprise demand for OpenAI’s models inside business software.

Still, Ghodsi said it’s important to maintain flexibility.

Databricks now hosts all three major foundation models — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet’s Gemini — so customers aren’t locked into a single provider.

But even as infrastructure ramps up, the scale and speed of OpenAI’s spending spree have raised questions about execution.

Nvidia is supplying capital and chips. Oracle is building the sites. OpenAI is anchoring the demand. It’s a circular economy that could come under pressure if any one player falters.

And while the headlines came fast this week, the physical buildout will take years to deliver — with much of it dependent on energy and grid upgrades that remain uncertain.

Friar acknowledged that challenge.

“There’s not enough compute to do all the things that AI can do, and so we need to get it started,” she said. “And we need to do it as a full ecosystem.”

WATCH: Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank unveil $400 billion Stargate data center

Apollo Hospitals approves major restructuring plan; to list digital health, pharmacy arms

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:27:57 +0000

Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Limited’s (AHEL) board on Monday announced a sweeping corporate overhaul, approving a composite scheme of arrangement involving its subsidiaries Apollo Healthco Limited (AHL) and Keimed Private Limited, alongside its wholly owned subsidiary Apollo Healthtech Limited.

Under the restructuring exercise, the company will first demerge its ‘Identified Business Undertaking’ into Apollo Healthtech. Subsequently, both AHL and Keimed Private Limited will be merged into Apollo Healthtech, consolidating critical operations under one roof.

Through this move, AHEL aims to unlock value through strategic reorganisation, enabling direct listing of its Omni Channel Pharmacy and Digital Health business, a company filing to the exchanges said.

“Composite Scheme creates a formidable Omni Channel Pharmacy Distribution and Digital Health platform leader in India, with scale of Rs 16,300 crores (US$1.9bn) of revenue in FY25, with stated plans to achieve Rs 25,000 crores revenue by FY27, with 7% EBITDA margin,” the company filing added.

Following this transaction, Apollo Healthtech Limited will seek listing of its equity shares on the NSE and BSE, paving the way for investors to participate directly in the reorganised entity.

Additionally, Apollo disclosed an agreement signed on June 30, 2025, between Rasmeli Limited, an existing shareholder of AHL, and AHL promoter Shobana Kamineni. Rasmeli agreed to share a portion of its investment upside with the promoter and key employees, aligning interests and rewarding performance.AHEL shareholders to have direct shareholding in a combined entity. For every 100 shares of AHEL, AHEL shareholders will receive 195.2 shares of the new entity. Listing of the entity is expected in 18-21 months, the company filing said.Commenting on the development, Suneeta Reddy, Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, said, “This comprehensive integrated network, overlaid with a strong digital layer, will allow us to create an impact of magnitude greater than could be achieved with a single format of care. This proposal enables AHEL shareholders to gain direct shareholding in India’s largest Omni-Channel Pharmacy and Digital Health Platform, enabling full value discovery and eliminating any hold co discount in valuation.

Meanwhile, AHEL will continue its focus on healthcare delivery, she added.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of Economic Times)

Hanwha in advanced talks over arms production for Saudi Arabia

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 05:54:36 +0000

Hanwha Aerospace Co. is in advanced discussions with Saudi Arabia over potential arms collaboration as the Middle East becomes the company’s main focus, according to the head of its global defense business.

The burgeoning opportunities in the region are a major reason South Korea’s largest defense contractor decided to announce a share-sale plan last month to raise funds, said Michael Coulter, who was named global defense president and chief executive officer at Hanwha at the end of last year.

“We’re in discussions both in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates right now about programs that will create capacity in the Middle East, that addresses sovereign” issues, and also helps address security threats, Coulter said in an interview with Bloomberg. “There’s a real opportunity for us to meet security challenges in the Middle East through local facilities.”

Hanwha has been one of the biggest beneficiaries from the surge in global demand for ground weapons following the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The company’s shares have rallied almost 30-fold over during the past five years, and it’s Asia’s top-performing stock this year. Known for its ability to deliver weapons faster and cheaper than rivals, the firm’s flagship weapons include the K9 self-propelled howitzer.

The company’s shares fell 2.1% Tuesday while the benchmark Kospi was little changed.

Hanwha is still deciding on the exact form of its involvement in Saudi Arabia, but it may be able to announce an agreement later this year, said Coulter, a former U.S. navy officer.

“We have not come to full decision yet on whether it’s facility in Saudi Arabia, or a joint venture, or a partnership, or we’re supporting a Saudi defense company, so that’s that but the market demand is there,” he said.

Hanwha’s overtures come as Saudi Arabia is investing trillions of dollars in a plan to develop the non-oil economy, including a goal to localize 50% of its military spending by 2030 under the plan it has called Vision 2030.

Middle East arms sales are a sensitive topic for South Korea as the country seeks to balance its ties with Arab states and its relations with its sole treaty ally the U.S., which has longstanding security relations with Israel.

Controversial sale

Hanwha earlier this month trimmed the size of its planned share sale to 2.3 trillion won ($1.6 billion) from an original 3.6 trillion won, following pushback from investors and financial authorities. The Financial Supervisory Service has also objected to its revised plan.

The decision to reduce the offering showed “a very responsible willingness by a company to listen to its investors and shareholders,” Coulter said.

“Yes, there’s a potential for a slight dilution in the near term, but look at our track record, look at the market opportunity, we’ve walked everybody through where we’re making the investments and the return on those investments from a business standpoint,” he said.

Europe plans

Hanwha is also in talks with a number of Western European nations about how it may help them increase their arms-making capacity in the face of rising global instability.

“We’re not intent on coming in and taking over and displacing European partners,” Coulter said. “We’re talking with governments, but we’re also talking with industry and saying where have you invested? Where have you not invested? Where can we be a partner?”

Coulter said he was optimistic the U.S. and South Korea will reach a deal that will avert a protracted trade dispute stemming from the Trump administration’s threat of higher tariffs.

“We are very confident that the two governments are going to come to resolution,” he said.

“There is a huge U.S. Army presence here. We have U.S. Navy ships in our shipyards here in Korea. So our governments are talking through that. I’m cautiously optimistic that will pan out and it won’t become a political issue.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

State Dept. Tells Congress It Plans to Send $8 Billion in Arms to Israel

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 08:19:12 +0000

The State Department has told Congress that it intends to approve $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel, the department’s office in charge of arms transfers said on Friday.

It could be the final set of arms transfers to Israel by President Biden, and represents a marker of continued support from the administration to a longtime ally even as the rising death toll in Israel’s war in Gaza has fueled growing opposition within his party to further weapons sales.

The weapons package includes artillery shells, small-diameter bombs, missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and GPS guidance systems for bombs, according to the informal notification provided to two committees of Congress. Many of the weapons are not for immediate use but instead would go into a manufacturing pipeline, with delivery possibly taking years.

Israel would use money provided by the United States to buy the weapons. The annual aid had been about $3 billion, but Mr. Biden increased that amount after Israel began waging war in Gaza following terrorist attacks by Hamas that left about 1,200 dead on Oct. 7, 2023.

During the informal notification period, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are expected to review the proposed sales and ask questions of the State Department. They can hold up the transfers if they have doubts. The top Democrats on both committees have been more skeptical of arms transfers to Israel, while the top Republicans have quickly granted approval.

Once the four top members grant approval to the State Department, the agency would give formal notification to Congress, which essentially means the proposed sales will go through. Congress would need a two-thirds vote in each house to pass a resolution blocking the sales.

The informal notification was reported earlier by Axios.

Weapons transfers to Israel have been a contentious issue that has dogged Mr. Biden among liberals. In the presidential election in November, some progressive voters and some Muslim American voters said they could not bring themselves to back Mr. Biden because of his steadfast support of Israel.

The Israeli military, supplied with U.S. weapons, has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, including many civilians, during the war, according to the health ministry in Gaza. Critics of Israel’s conduct of the war have beseeched Mr. Biden to withhold weapons aid to Israel to pressure it to curb its military operations, which have demolished most of Gaza.

Mr. Biden and his top aides, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have tried to walk a fine line, sometimes criticizing Israeli actions even as they have said Israel has the right to defend itself. At one point, Mr. Biden said he was withholding a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to try to dissuade it from destroying Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, but the Israeli military reduced most of Rafah to rubble anyway.

At another point, the Biden administration held up an order of 24,000 assault rifles out of concern that settlers in the West Bank could use the rifles in violence against Palestinians there.

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has a record of strongly backing Israel and supported robust weapons shipments to the Jewish state in his first administration, has been urging Israel and Hamas to enter into a cease-fire deal before he takes office this month.

American officials working under Mr. Biden are trying to make a cease-fire deal now to get hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 attacks freed.

Executive dreamers, chief wizards and vision officers: In 2024, the job title arms race hit a record low

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 07:36:40 +0000

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US approves sale of this advanced missile defense system to Taiwan in $2 billion arms package

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 23:24:57 +0000

The United States has approved $2 billion in arms sales to Taiwan, including the first-time delivery to the self-ruled island of an advanced surface-to-air missile defense system, in a move sure to anger China.

Taiwan’s presidential office on Saturday thanked Washington for greenlighting the potential arms sales. Under the island’s new president, Lai Ching-te, Taiwan has been stepping up defense measures as China increased its military threats against the territory it claims as its own.

Beijing last week held war games encircling Taiwan for the second time since Lai took office in May.

The U.S. is Taiwan’s strongest unofficial ally and its laws bound it to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.

“Strengthening Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities is the foundation for maintaining regional stability,” Taiwan’s presidential spokesperson Karen Kuo said.

The potential sales package includes three National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and related equipment valued at up to $1.16 billion, according to the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

It also includes radar systems worth an estimated $828 million.

The Chinese government did not immediately comment on the potential arms sales.

The NASAMS system has been battle-tested in Ukraine and will help to strengthen the Taiwanese army’s air defense capabilities, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said.

China’s war games last week were aimed at practicing the “sealing off of key ports and key areas” around Taiwan, according to Chinese officials. Taiwan counted a record one-day total of 153 aircraft, 14 navy vessels and 12 Chinese government ships.

Bitcoin miners at Donald Trump’s closed-door event say he thinks bitcoin can help win AI arms race

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:42:10 +0000

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago on June 5, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Now that his criminal trial in New York has wrapped up, the former president has scheduled a number of fundraising events around the country to aid his presidential bid. (Photo by Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Getty Images

This past Tuesday night in Palm Beach, Florida, about a dozen bitcoin mining executives and experts sat down with former president Donald Trump for an hour and a half in a small tea room at the Mar-a-Lago Club. As a steady drizzle fell outside, they sipped from Trump-branded water bottles and tried to sell him on the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The meeting marked the first time the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee — recently convicted of 34 felonies in New York — had taken a meeting with the technologists securing the $1.3 trillion bitcoin network.

The intimate gathering brought together a coalition of some of the biggest private and public American miners in the business, including representatives from Riot Platforms, Marathon Digital Holdings, Terawulf, CleanSpark, Core Scientific, Arkon Energy, Cholla Energy and Exacore.

CNBC spoke to half the miners who attended the closed door session on Tuesday, including the CEO of Riot Platforms. Jason Les told CNBC that one of the group’s top talking points was the fact that the U.S. is number one in a lot of things, and it should be number one at bitcoin, especially as the world’s top coin touches new all-time price highs this year. Bitcoin is up 160% to around $67,000 since June 2023.

Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) — who is the ranking member on the Senate’s Banking Committee and Finance Subcommittee, as well as a vocal proponent of the digital asset industry broadly, and bitcoin mining in particular — was also there to help guide what participants described as a free-flowing and wide-ranging discussion on bitcoin, energy, job creation and the push to beat China in the artificial intelligence arms race.

Many agreed that the former president was collaborative, had well-informed questions and seemed genuinely interested in how bitcoin miners could help solve America’s energy deficit problem.

BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey, who organized the mining sit-down with Trump, says that the meeting is part of a larger push to support the former president’s bid to return to the White House.

“Our industry intends to make bitcoin and crypto a defining issue for the 2024 election,” Bailey said of the effort. “As an industry we are committed to raising over $100 million and turning out more than 5,000,000 voters for the Trump reelection effort.”

Less than four hours after Trump’s roundtable wrapped, the former president took to social media to extol the virtues of the bitcoin mining business.

“Bitcoin mining may be our last line of defense against a CBDC,” Trump posted shortly before midnight on Tuesday.

“Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies are created through a process known as proof-of-work, in which miners around the world run high-powered computers that collectively validate transactions and simultaneously create new tokens.

The process requires heaps of electricity, leading miners to seek out the cheapest sources of power. Many have begun to set up shop in the U.S. in the last few years, much to the chagrin of a mix of mostly Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“It’s such an easy issue for politicians,” in part because there is “no major ask that we have to change the rules or anything else,” Les, who runs a bitcoin mining company with a market cap of about $3 billion, told CNBC.

“We just want to be treated like everyone else,” Les added, noting that more than one in four people in the U.S. now owns bitcoin, according to a survey recently conducted by bitcoin financial services firm Unchained.

Bitcoin that’s “made in America”

For months, Trump — who recently launched his latest non-fungible token collection on the solana blockchain in April — has been making increasingly bullish comments on crypto.

He is now accepting digital currency donations and has pledged to defend the rights of those who choose to self-custody their coins, meaning that they don’t rely on a centralized entity like Coinbase to hold their tokens and instead, do it themselves in personal crypto wallets, which are sometimes outside the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. Trump also vowed at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington in May to keep Sen. Warren and “her goons” away from bitcoin holders.

In early June in San Francisco, technologists, crypto executives, and venture capitalists paid up to $300,000 per ticket to join a Trump fundraiser that ultimately raised more than $12 million.

And then on Tuesday, Trump declared that all future bitcoin will be minted in the U.S., should he return to the White House.

Geoff Kendrick, who heads up digital assets research at Standard Chartered, recently wrote that he expects bitcoin to reach the $100,000 price threshold as the U.S. approaches the November presidential election and $150,000 by the end of the year if Trump wins.

Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago

It was a no comms and no photographer policy at the mining roundtable on Tuesday.

Attendees, who had an expansive view over thunderstorms on the Atlantic coast that night, forfeited their smartphones to a Radio Frequency Identification pouch that blocked incoming and outgoing signals. As participants lost their sense of time, they convened under a large chandelier listening to the former president actively engage on the nuances of America’s energy deficit, bitcoin mining, and AI — without the aid of a teleprompter — for the duration of the conversation.

“He just really knew his stuff,” said Browder of Marathon.

“We were very impressed by how in the weeds he was on some pretty dense topics when you’re talking about artificial intelligence, data centers, energy buildout, and transmission,” continued Browder, who added that it was the first time bitcoin miners have formally met with the former president to discuss the industry.

CNBC spoke to half a dozen miners who were at the meeting, all of whom converged on the same conclusion; that Trump understood how bitcoin mining complements some of the bigger macro challenges that the U.S. has as a country, most notably the imminent need for the rapid buildout of energy production and transmission infrastructure amid the booming interest in generative AI technologies.

Schultz of the NASDAQ-traded mining firm CleanSpark said Trump came in, sat down, and got right down to business after grabbing a Diet Coke and a cookie from the four-plate spread of macadamia, chocolate chip, and oatmeal varieties adorning the table.

Trump “actually believes that bitcoin provides value,” said CleanSpark’s executive chairman. “I went there feeling like this is going to be a campaign rally; a highly politicized campaign rally.”

“It was anything but a fundraiser pitch,” continued Schultz.

Exacore president Chris Cook echoed that takeaway, telling CNBC that Trump was “very knowledgeable on the subject” of bitcoin mining and that he understood the significance of the job creation that could come from supporting big data mining in the U.S.

“We’re able to train people that have been displaced from industries that may have evolved or no longer exist — and train them to operate and work in a bitcoin mine,” said Cook. “The coal industry, for example. There’s not nearly as many jobs there anymore, and we can teach them to operate a bitcoin mine.”

Amanda Fabiano, a veteran of the mining industry who is on the board of a publicly traded mining firm and the founder of Fabiano Consulting, came away with a similar impression. She says that the former president seemed especially interested in hearing more about the substantial job creation that the mining industry generates in remote parts of the country in sectors ranging from technology to construction, as well as the financial incentive it provides for the buildout of infrastructure to harness the power of stranded renewable energy sources.

Marathon’s Browder says that a lot of the places where they mine bitcoin are in rural areas of the United States that have been left behind, whether it was a town once known for its coal plants, or factories that have shuttered altogether.

“We’ve come in and revitalized those areas, and I think that resonates very well with former President Trump, his team, and obviously, a lot of voters in rural America that support him,” said Browder.

Exacore’s Cook says the kind of job creation they’re talking about extends well beyond staffing a mine. The mining industry justifies the economic investment to create new power generation infrastructure, which then creates the need for thousands of new roles to make that buildout happen.

“That’s where you’ve got all these ancillary jobs; it’s not just the bitcoin mining directly,” said Cook.

“I think we can about double the amount of power generation in the U.S., which would, by my estimate, add two to three percent to GDP and create close to a million jobs,” continued Cook.

“He’s been speaking more about energy independence, jobs, and technology,” Marathon Digital’s Browder said of Trump. “I think it’s the broader context of what’s happening around the world with the power competition between the U.S. and China.”

Across the U.S. are untapped and stranded sources of renewable energy. In West Texas, for example, there is an idyllic overlap of sun quality and wind speed. But a lot of that renewable energy is concentrated in remote parts of the state, and without a financial incentive, there is little reason to build out renewable infrastructure to harness this energy.

Enter bitcoin miners.

Some have opted to build mining sites where wind and solar are abundant and the transmission system is constrained, meaning that power wants to flow down the line, but the lines are full. These mines act like a large power station but in reverse. The mines will absorb abundant renewable energy at times when supply outpaces demand, thereby monetizing these assets when there are no other buyers. And on the flip side, the mines will incrementally ramp down their energy intake, as demand on the grid rises.

Adding bitcoin miners to the portfolio of energy buyers has helped to improve the core economics of renewable power production. Providing demand to these semi-stranded assets essentially makes renewables economically viable when they might not be otherwise.

Schultz noted, however, that Trump isn’t a huge fan of wind energy, because it’s too expensive to build, maintain, and dispose of when the components go bad, so he doesn’t see it as a long-term solution, but he is apparently a fan of renewables otherwise.

“It’s a race against the rest of the world building this infrastructure, so we don’t want the United States to be left behind in this regard,” added Riot’s Les.

AI meets bitcoin mining

Demand for AI compute and infrastructure surged after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022, setting off a rush of investment in AI models and startups.

Data centers alone could use up to 9% of the country’s power by the end of the decade, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. That’s more than double today’s demand across the U.S today.

“When you talk about the grid and energy production, a lot of the conversation was around AI and the amount of energy that’s going to be needed there,” said Marathon’s Browder.

Exacore’s Cook noted that Trump “was very much aware of how much energy AI needs.”

Bitcoin miners do two things especially well.

When miners partner with utility companies, they turn off their data centers almost instantly when there is too much power demand and give energy back. This helps to stabilize the grid, and miners are then compensated for curtailing their consumption.

In some cases, bitcoin miners also make it more cost effective to build the infrastructure necessary to bring renewables onto the grid.

Both those things are important when it comes to building out energy infrastructure across the country.

“These are synergies that I think the Trump administration understands very well in this context of, we need more energy, and there’s a grid power competition between the U.S. and China,” said Marathon’s Browder.

“Those are the high level pieces that I think the Trump administration are thinking about and developing policies around,” added Browder. “They’re very forward thinking.”

In the closed-door meeting, Trump also spoke about the fact that fossil fuels are likely to make a comeback as they are in several other countries, due to the demand for increased energy capacity for data centers around the world.

Tapping into nuclear energy is seen by many as a cleaner alternative and the answer to meeting these ballooning power demands.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have invested in nuclear plants in recent years, as has Sam Altman, who is best known for being the CEO of his $80 billion start-up OpenAI. Altman told CNBC last year that he’s a big believer in nuclear when it comes to serving the needs of AI workloads. He’s also backed two different nuclear power start-ups, one of which just listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May.

“I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear,” Altman said. “I mean, maybe we could get there just with solar and storage. But from my vantage point, I feel like this is the most likely and the best way to get there.”

TeraWulf powers its mining sites with nuclear energy, and is looking to get into machine learning.

The company’s chief strategy officer, Kerri Langlais, tells CNBC that whether it’s bitcoin mining or AI, the reliance solely on intermittent renewables, whether it be solar or wind, which are fluctuating, is not going to be enough to support the tremendous projections for the amount of energy that is going to be required to support build out over the next five to ten years.

“We definitely talked about nuclear,” Langlais said of the sit-down with Trump.

“We need to think about that in the context of how we’re operating, how the grid is operating, the role that bitcoin mining plays in that, because we can provide a pretty valuable service to the grid in that sort of fluctuating supply environment.”

— CNBC’s Brian Schwartz contributed to this report.