Oct 7

Oct 7 Beginner's 101 Guide : The Race Behind the Race: Who Will Power, Pay for and Protect Artificial Intelligence

Foreign Affairs Forum | Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎)| October 7th 2026

Why This Matters Now

Most people think the race for artificial intelligence is about who builds the cleverest chatbot.

This week's news shows something bigger. The real race is about money, electricity, computer chips and security.

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎), an expert in human-centered superintelligence, geopolitical strategy and the risks of AI warfare and bioterrorism, says the winners will be the countries and companies that can handle all of these at once.

The Money Problem

Building AI costs an enormous amount. SpaceX is seeking about $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips. Roughly $10 billion would come from bank loans and $30 billion from investment-grade debt, led by Apollo Global Management.

Morgan Stanley estimates the industry may need about $1.5 trillion in outside financing by 2028.

This means AI is no longer just a technology business. It is becoming an infrastructure business, like building railways or power stations. Companies borrow to build, and then must earn enough to repay.

Dr. 🆎 notes that a country with deep and trusted financial markets has a hidden advantage, because it can pay for big projects that others cannot.

There is a warning here too. Anthropic's revenue reportedly grew nearly twelvefold to $4.6 billion in 2025, yet the company spent about $7.3 billion on computing and had an operating loss of about $8.06 billion.

As AI gets cheaper to use, companies need far more customers to make up the difference. If profits do not arrive, investors could lose confidence.

The Electricity Problem

AI machines are hungry for power.

Google has agreed to buy 3,590 MW of electricity from Constellation Energy, and about 890 MW of it will come from new nuclear capacity.

Constellation plans to invest more than $4.3 billion in its reactors.

Power grids in parts of America are already under strain.

Dr. 🆎 puts it simply: a country that cannot produce and deliver electricity cannot run its own AI, no matter how brilliant its scientists are. The shortage has moved from chips to data centers, then to electricity, and now to the wires that carry it.

The Chip Problem

Chips remain central, but the picture is changing.

Marvell Technology now expects about $20 billion in revenue in fiscal 2028 because big tech companies want custom-designed chips, not just standard ones.

Marvell says its deal with Google could bring in as much as $120 billion through fiscal 2033 if targets are met.

More chip designers mean less dependence on a single supplier, which makes the American system stronger.

China Builds Its Own System

China's DeepSeek is preparing to raise more than 80 billion yuan, about $11.9 billion, and the company could be valued at around $74 billion.

Tencent and the battery maker CATL are expected to invest, and DeepSeek is working with Huawei on software for Huawei's chips. The picture is of China building a full home-grown system: its own money, chips, tools, models and apps.

Even so, China is finding ways around American limits.

Tencent has reportedly agreed to a five-year deal worth about $7 billion with Oracle for access to roughly 100,000 advanced chips in data centers across Southeast Asia.

Reuters says it could not independently confirm this report. If true, it shows that controlling where chips are shipped is not the same as controlling who gets to use them. Washington may need to rethink its rules.

Europe and Japan Join In

France's Mistral AI released Mistral Large 4 on October 6th.

The company says this open model beats several Chinese rivals in areas such as cybersecurity. It will be widely released on October 27, but experts and governments will get an early version first. Mistral has raised €3 billion ($3.4 billion), with ASML and Samsung among its investors.

Europe hopes to show it can build technology, not only regulate it.

Japan is expanding too. AirTrunk will add $1 billion to its data center near Tokyo, which will have more than 300 MW of capacity.

Another $15 billion, 400 MW project is planned by JERA, Dell and RHAELM. Japan is a close American ally, so this strengthens the wider group of friendly nations.

The Security Question

AI is getting very good at finding weaknesses in computer code. Anthropic's partners found at least 129,000 software weaknesses between April and July, and more than 33,000 were serious.

Anthropic is now giving its strongest tools to more approved security teams, including those who protect power grids and airlines.

This is useful for defense, but there is a danger. The same tool that helps a defender find and fix a weakness could help an attacker exploit it.

Dr. 🆎 warns that the rules developed for cyber tools will be needed for biological risks too, and that humans must always stay in charge of decisions that matter.

A Warning From the IMF

Kristalina Georgieva of the International Monetary Fund warned today that high energy costs, record debt and the AI boom itself are risks to the world economy.

The IMF thinks AI could add around 0.5% a year to global growth if handled well. But if companies do not earn the huge profits that investors expect, prices could fall sharply, hurting many other parts of the economy.

What Should Be Done

Governments should watch how much debt is flowing into AI and test whether the system could survive a downturn. They should build power plants and grids faster. They should close the loophole that lets companies rent chips that cannot be sold to them. They should agree on shared rules for who can use the most powerful AI tools. And friendly nations should work together, combining America's money and design skills, Europe's equipment and research, and Japan's industry and energy.

The Bottom Line

The AI race is no longer just about the smartest model. It is about who can pay for it, power it, protect it and keep it under human control.

Dr. 🆎 believes the countries that see the whole picture, rather than one headline at a time, will shape the rules for everyone else.

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj is a polymath and veteran strategist whose career spans more than four decades of high-stakes leadership across business, public life, geopolitics, and scholarship.

He has served as president of two SAP consulting partner firms and has combined that operational record with long-form research at the intersection of technical infrastructure and human behavior. Twice a candidate for the United States Congress, he brings to his present work a practitioner’s understanding of electoral politics, legislative constraint, and the distance between policy design and public consent. That experience sharpens his reading of national division: campaigns expose how fiscal choices, institutional trust, and social psychology interact in real time, and how durable reform depends on legitimacy as much as on technical soundness.

At the center of his current practice is Strategic Country Assessment. Dr. Bhardwaj approaches the state as a diagnostician, applying a structured framework to the social, economic, and political conditions of nations. He joins fiscal analysis with social psychology to trace the origins of budget imbalance and civic fracture, and to propose systemic remedies aimed at economic stability and social cohesion. His congressional campaigns inform that method. They trained a habit of testing abstract models against voter realities, institutional incentives, and the limits of mandate—an outlook he now applies to country-level diagnosis and to advice on contested policy environments.

This work is extended by his engagement with computational epistemology: the formal structures through which machine systems represent claims, and the ways those representations meet human belief. He treats the present convergence of machine intelligence and global infrastructure—what he terms the Prometheus Protocol—as a problem of knowledge, governance, and risk, not merely of engineering.

His academic formation includes doctorates in Social Psychology and Theology, grounding his attention to collective belief, moral frameworks, and the unspoken drivers of institutional behavior. He is advancing further study toward a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. A foundation in mechanical engineering, international trade, and finance supplies the structural discipline he brings to military theory, national policy, and global maritime energy chokepoints. Parallel work on high-stakes initial public offerings gives him a direct view of capital formation, strategic competition, and the contests that shape technological and economic primacy.

As Editor-in-Chief of Washington Media and an advisor associated with United Nations forums, his commentary on state power, institutional capture, and the historical trajectories of Russia and the Gulf has become reference reading for observers of a multipolar order. Through his Selective Writings, he also argues for the vulnerable, pressing for the dismantling of structures that deny dignity and free choice.

Outside formal analysis, he remains attached to the rhythms of the natural world. An avid photographer of forests, waterfalls, and caverns, and a close observer of butterflies, he treats ecological interconnection as a standing corrective to purely instrumental views of policy and power. That sensibility is continuous with his life as a single parent—the commitment he regards as his most consequential—and with a public outlook formed in two congressional campaigns: that authority is justified only where it enlarges freedom, and that analysis which cannot survive contact with citizens is incomplete.

Follow the work:

IG: @DrAntonioFAF

Website