Elon’s Vision For The Future Hits Compute Wall
November 3, 2026Listen to Free Audio Version Here
Democrats have taken back the House and Senate, and I can already picture the photograph. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and a few other tech executives are seated shoulder to shoulder, right hands in the air. A member of Congress leans into the microphone and asks, “Did you design your chatbot to make children want to come back?” The cameras will be waiting for the answer. I suspect they’ll get more mileage out of the photograph.
If you’re old enough to remember the tobacco hearings, you know the shot. In April 1994, seven tobacco executives swore an oath before a House subcommittee and told Congress they believed nicotine wasn’t addictive. An AI hearing could tell us what companies knew, what their own tests showed and what they did when they found a problem. I expect some members will come looking for those answers. I expect others already know what they want the evening news to look like.
There was a time when Elon Musk and Tesla fit comfortably into the Democratic story about the future. The Obama administration’s Energy Department lent Tesla money, and Tesla paid it back nine years early. Then Musk backed Donald Trump and went to work cutting the federal government through DOGE. By the spring of 2025, protesters were outside Tesla showrooms trying to hit him in the pocketbook. The car still ran on electricity. Its chief executive had changed political lanes, and suddenly the car was in the wrong lane with him.
Then came the inauguration. After Trump won his second term, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Musk got some of the best seats in the house. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft later appeared on the donor list for Trump’s White House ballroom. Democrats were already pressing the White House about those donations in 2025. Now they’ll have committee gavels in both chambers. I’d expect requests for records about the ballroom, questions about access to the White House and hearings on the industry’s products. If you’re a tech executive who thought a ballroom contribution bought you some goodwill in Washington, you may be about to discover how quickly goodwill depreciates.
Once the new Congress is seated, committee chairs can schedule hearings, demand documents and issue subpoenas under their chambers’ rules. Democrats can move bills through committees in both chambers and bargain over what goes into federal spending bills. Trump still has a veto, and ending a filibuster on most legislation still takes 60 votes in the Senate. That makes a sweeping AI law a harder sell. It leaves plenty of room for months of hearings, funding fights and uncertainty about what rules will be in place by the time a company opens its next data center.
The proposals are already on the table. Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz’s GUARDRAILS Act would undo Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting state AI regulation, leaving companies to contend with rules that can vary by state. A House bill would freeze construction of new data centers until Congress passes AI safeguards. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Greg Casar have announced a proposal to ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development. Those are three ways to put the brakes on the industry. One can raise the cost of selling a product across state lines. Another can make computing power scarcer. The third can stop some companies from training their next model in the first place.
This is where I part company with the big-government approach. I want a market where a small outfit can rent computing power, try an idea and take a customer away from one of the giants. If a company knew its chatbot was putting children in danger, put the documents on the table. If a data center deal sticks local families with the power bill, bring out the contract. A nationwide construction freeze also stops the project that can pay its own way. The giant with computing capacity already under contract can wait it out. The six people trying to build a competitor will pay whatever it costs to rent what’s left.
Europe has already given us a look at how this can play out. The European Union adopted an AI law with different obligations for different levels of risk, then went back to simplify parts of it and revise deadlines. Washington can spend years on that same exercise. Meanwhile, Stanford’s 2026 AI Index put the top American model just 2.7 percent ahead of the top Chinese model on the ranking it tracked in March. That’s one scoreboard in a much larger race, but it ought to cure Washington of the idea that America has a comfortable lead to spend. Beijing gets to keep building while we argue about the conditions under which Americans may pour concrete.
Democrats may enjoy watching the tech CEOs squirm. But if they turn that schadenfreude into a freeze on AI development, investors could stop writing checks before Congress even passes a bill. AI spending is doing enough to drive U.S. growth that a sudden investment freeze could tip the country into recession.
Compute, electricity, and even financing were always going to be hard to come by. But the wet blanket was always going to be the messy humans, in the flesh.
