Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldStargate was a 1994 science fiction film about travellers zooming through a wormhole to an alternative reality. That seems an appropriate name, too, for the massive artificial intelligence infrastructure project promising to invest as much as $500bn in the US over the next four years, announced by President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening. Backed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, Stargate reflects the alternative reality created by the fusion of the AI superbubble and Trump\u2019s re-election. Washington, it seems, is disappearing down its own wormhole.\u201cThis monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America\u2019s potential under a new president,\u201d Trump said of Stargate. Standing stiffly in their suits alongside Trump in the White House, Larry Ellison, Oracle\u2019s 80-year-old co-founder, Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s vauntingly ambitious chief executive, and Masayoshi Son, SoftBank\u2019s mercurial chair, all beamed with pleasure, like the personifications of old tech, new tech and global tech.\u201cThis is the beginning of a golden age,\u201d Son said, playing back Trump\u2019s remarks in his inauguration address. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be able to do this without you, Mr President,\u201d gushed Altman. The prominent presence of several other tech billionaires at Trump\u2019s inauguration also highlighted how much they are in thrall to the US president.Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary blogger and champion of the Dark Enlightenment movement who has a cult following in some west coast circles, has argued that democracy is done and called for a more authoritarian kind of techno-monarchy. Trump\u2019s \u201cfirst buddy\u201d Elon Musk has already taken to calling himself the technoking of Tesla. But, surrounded by his nerdy courtiers, it could be Trump who has emerged as the technoking of America.Trump has made it clear that he wants to reassert US hegemony in technology over China, particularly in AI. He has already rescinded his predecessor Joe Biden\u2019s executive order on AI safety. He also seems intent on deregulating crypto and reversing the antitrust agenda of the Biden administration to give Big Tech even freer rein. Sniffing profits and new opportunities in the defence, nuclear and space industries, the biggest US tech companies have been quick to applaud Trump\u2019s moves.These companies already rank among the richest and most powerful in history and need little help from Trump. The independent research firm Arete forecasts that five of them \u2014 Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft \u2014 will this year collectively increase their revenue to more than $2tn. In spite of laying out $300bn on capital expenditure, Arete predicts they will still record profit margins and generate free cash flow of $430bn.Yet three things may yet check their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying between the biggest tech companies themselves as they all make colossal bets on AI and try to disrupt each others\u2019 business models. \u201cBig Tech can no longer deliver growth by staying in their respective lanes,\u201d says Richard Kramer, Arete\u2019s founder. \u201cWe expect more Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other\u2019s \u2018core\u2019 business, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and ecommerce.\u201dThat competition is also increasingly acquiring a legal dimension as tech companies attack each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he, and others, were duped into investing in the AI start-up because of its \u201cfake humanitarian mission\u201d. He also trolled the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: \u201cThey don\u2019t actually have the money.\u201dMicrosoft has testified against Google to break up its search monopoly. As Matt Stoller, author of the Big newsletter on monopoly power, has written, individuals, companies and states may pursue antitrust actions even if Washington holds back. \u201cAntitrust is a body of law that\u2019s designed for business leaders to fight with one another,\u201d Stoller wrote.However, some leading venture capital investors in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreessen, have also been warning of the dangers of large companies weaponising the government to crush start-ups and stifle innovation. They have been promoting the virtues of Little Tech, which they claim has always been the \u201cvanguard of American technology supremacy\u201d. Vice-president JD Vance, a former VC investor, has in the past supported antitrust interventions to promote competition, arguing against \u201cthis weird idea that something can\u2019t be tyrannical if it comes through the operation of a free market\u201d.One of the biggest determinants of tech policy may simply be who has the greatest access to the technoking\u2019s ear.john.thornhill@ft.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldStargate was a 1994 science fiction film about travellers zooming through a wormhole to an alternative reality. That seems an appropriate name, too, for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-178470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}