🟣 EV Daily: White House declares AI race; Alphabet hikes AI capex; China widens dev gap; Lobbying blitz in DC; Chinese EV batteries grow
Five stories shaping the future of tech + power
Lead story: 🇺🇸 Winning the Race
The White House’s new AI Action Plan reads like an industrial‑scale mobilization order. Its 90 recommendations slash permitting delays, sideline DEI and climate hurdles, and fast‑track gigawatt data‑center grids and fabs. They also hard‑wire “objective, non‑ideological” procurement rules that privilege open‑weight US models.
The aim is simple: unquestioned technological dominance. Full‑stack export diplomacy — bundling US chips, open‑weight models and standards — plus tighter chip controls keep allies close and China at arm’s length. The document is even titled ‘Winning the Race’.
This is AI as statecraft. Compute, energy and standards bodies are the new strategic high ground. Private industry is invited to write the rulebook, recommending which regulations to scrap in exchange for momentum. The upside is speed. The downside (mainly for the rest of the world) is a regulatory vacuum primed for social, environmental and geopolitical blowback. Expect a trans-Atlantic clash pitting Washington’s ‘objective’ AI against Europe’s DEI-anchored regime. [White House]
Key signals, quick scan
A 30-second scan of four secondary signals that hint at where the curve is bending.
📈 Alphabet has hiked its 2025 AI capex to a record $85 billion, around 22% of all its revenue. The figure, announced in Google’s latest earnings call, eclipses many sovereign budgets, indicating that scale itself is becoming a moat. The firm also announced its AI Overviews in search have 2 billion monthly users, while Gemini has hit 450 million monthly active users. Search revenues remain robust, climbing 12% year‑on‑year to $54.2 billion. [FT, WSJ]
👨🏻💻 China has 2.2 million open-source developers, compared with 1.7 million in the US. This eastward shift in open-source talent undermines Western model licensing and fuels a community-driven AI stack outside US influence. [SCMP]
🏛️ More than 500 organizations lobbied regulators in Washington DC on AI in the first six months of 2025. OpenAI alone spent $1.8 million on lobbyists, showing that regulatory capture is scaling with the model race. [FT]
🔋 The average battery size in Chinese battery electric vehicles (BEVs) rose around 4% month-on-month in June to 67.5kWh. At this pace, range anxiety doesn’t stand a chance. [X/EVCurveFuturist]
Live with Azeem highlights:
Last week, I chatted with
, CEO of The Atlantic. He shared with me some useful prompts he uses to pop his filter bubble and sharpen his thinking:“Imagine you’re totally skeptical of this person. Pretend you want to find every error. Now read the essay and write the most obnoxious but intelligent critique you can.”
That gives you a guide to harden the argument or rephrase it. It’s especially useful in politics.
“Read this story and identify the six embedded assumptions you don’t even notice — because you’re in a filter bubble — that will trigger readers on the other side.”
Once you do that exercise, you start spotting things. Like a throwaway line about Brendan Carr — just to pick a random example. It might seem harmless, but it’s guaranteed to piss off a bunch of people. And you didn’t even notice. So cut that stupid little line about Brendan Carr, right?
Watch the full episode on YouTube. I go live on Substack every Friday at 5 pm UK time | 12 pm Eastern | 9 am Pacific.
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economic planning?