Reject the Bailout for AI Firms

Bailouts occur when governments provide financial or other support to a company or industry to prevent its collapse. The US government has already started bailing out the AI industry. The Trump administration’s executive actions lay out a set of extraordinary measures to boost the AI industry and its push to expand data center infrastructure across the country. These actions include directly investing in AI companies, providing federal tax subsidies and tax credits for data center infrastructure,1 proposing financial support for qualifying data center projects,2 accelerating government adoption of AI,3 brokering sales deals with other countries on behalf of AI companies,4 kick-starting an exports program to support sales to foreign markets,5 and backing a $1 billion loan to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online to power Microsoft’s AI data centers.6 

The federal government can make clear that it will not tolerate a bailout for the AI industry. Actions it can take include the following.

  1.  The Council of Economic Advisers, Artificial Intelligence and the Great Divergence, January 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Great-Divergence-5.pdf. ↩︎
  2. Executive Order 14318 of July 23, 2025, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure, 90 Fed. Reg. 35385 (2025), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/28/2025-14212/accelerating-federal-permitting-of-data-center-infrastructure. ↩︎
  3. White House, Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, July 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf. ↩︎
  4. Robbie Whelan and Amrith Ramkumar, “U.S. Approves Deal to Sell AI Chips to Middle East,” Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/u-s-approves-deal-to-sell-ai-chips-to-middle-east-79d68f36. ↩︎
  5. Executive Order 14320 of July 23, 2025, Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack, title 3 (2025) 35393-95, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/28/2025-14218/promoting-the-export-of-the-american-ai-technology-stack; U.S. Department of State Office of the Spokesperson, “U.S. Department of State Pilots ‘Concierge’ Service for Pax Silica Signatories to Accelerate Core AI Infrastructure Exports,” February 19, 2026, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/u-s-department-of-state-pilots-concierge-service-for-pax-silica-signatories-to-accelerate-core-ai-infrastructure-exports. ↩︎
  6. Costas Paris, “U.S. Backs $1 Billion Loan to Restart the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant,” Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-ba857bc9. ↩︎