Artificial intelligence is reshaping the future, but there’s a catch: it runs on energy, minerals, and infrastructure that the United States is struggling to deliver. On this week’s Breaking Battlegrounds, hosts Sam Stone and Sean Noble sat down with Satya Thallem to unpack why America risks falling behind China—not because of a lack of talent or innovation, but because of red tape and policy paralysis.

Thallem explained that AI isn’t just “smart code.” Every data center and every GPU requires electricity on a massive scale, alongside copper and rare earth minerals that are essential for production. Yet instead of ramping up, America has tied itself in knots. Projects get delayed for years under permitting battles. Environmental reviews stall development. Even new data centers are being blocked in some cities.

Meanwhile, China isn’t waiting. They push through projects, expand mining, and build power capacity at breakneck speed, ignoring environmental and human rights concerns. The result: while the U.S. debates, China acts. And every delay on our side gives them a bigger lead in the technologies that will define both economic strength and national security.

But the podcast made one point clear—America has the resources. We have copper, we have rare earths, and we have the industrial base to build. What’s missing is the political will to reform permitting, streamline approvals, and prioritize national security over endless bureaucracy.

The hosts also took aim at how radical environmental activism often winds up serving China’s advantage. By blocking U.S. mining and energy projects, activists unintentionally make America more dependent on Chinese supply chains. The irony: a movement meant to protect the environment could be cementing reliance on a country with some of the world’s worst environmental practices.

The message from Thallem was blunt: if the U.S. wants to remain a global leader in AI, we must get serious about energy, minerals, and infrastructure—fast. Otherwise, America may find itself running the race of the century with no power left in the tank.

Transcript

**Sam Stone: **In terms of so, so one of the things that's been concerning me and Chuck and I have talked about it and I think Sean, you and I have talked about this once before also, but, we are falling behind in some key areas for this future, whether it's AI or just in general, the future energy production and mineral production in particular, kind of jumped to the top of my mind.

Satya, how important are having plans for those areas and other, you know, upstream areas to develop this technology right now and making that possible again.

**Satya Thallem: **Well, I'm glad you mentioned you'd referenced before like what are actually the constraints so that we're coming back to it. There is no future of the world, AI or otherwise, that does not require more electricity, more energy. There just isn't. AI in particular, as you guys know, those data centers and the operation and the inference compute for AI systems is hugely energy intensive.

We are terrible at building in this country right now. Right and especially the kind of permitting and citing and the environmental reviews. I'm not against environmental considerations, but we've got to rationalize the system. This is a thing where China is very good. They go the extreme opposite. They don't care about any sort of environmental concerns or human rights concerns for that example. I'm not saying we need to do that, but they have that advantage, right?

And we need to figure out a way to be more efficient and be able to compete on that on that level. The other thing is, part of the justification the administration put out about relaxing the export controls on NVIDIA's GPUs was we have a supply constraint on critical rare earth minerals. That's true, but supply curves are flexible. There is no evidence I've seen that the US doesn't have the capacity to identify, to locate, and be able to extract these necessary elements. There's going to be a lag. can't snap our fingers and just do it tomorrow.

But this is another area we've handicapped ourselves. We don't need to be dependent on other countries and have to be beholden them to say, we can't, we don't have the prerogative to pursue our national security interests because we need these, these inputs. We do need those inputs, but we have the ability to produce them and to refine them here or with other allied nations not necessarily adversarial nations.

**Sam Stone: **To tie into the permitting problem, because this came up, think last week it was in the paper, you probably caught it too, a new copper mine will relatively soon be opened here in Arizona. Not where people think. It's going to be opened basically right in the heart of Phoenix. Because there's land there that's privately owned and it's zoned industrial and they don't have to go get all the permitting to just start digging there. So they're doing it.

**Sean Noble: **Yeah, I mean, you know, resolution copper, there's other mines that have been, you know, in the planning stages for two decades, and we haven't gotten there. You know, city of Tucson just killed a data center because of the quote unquote environmental concerns. What's amazing to me, and this is something that, you know, there's going to have to be some, you know, coming together on this.

I don't know if it will work, but the radical environmental movement. which has tried to stop all industrialization, tried to stop all growth, is now basically the tool of this communist Chinese. they are literally hampering us in being competitive with the Chinese.

**Sam Stone: **Great defense.

**Sean Noble: **Yeah, I think that's right. And I don't know if that's the intent, but that's the effect. And it doesn't matter. Right.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!