In a recent rally, Donald Trump declared that artificial intelligence will be “bigger than the internet, bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.” He then promised to eliminate “regulatory obstacles,” fast-track data center construction, and pressure local officials to approve new power plants. The crowd cheered. But for those of us who’ve spent years building decentralized networks, the applause felt like a warning bell.
Trump’s vision is one of centralized, state-backed AI supremacy—a world where a handful of hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft own the compute, the data, and the narrative. It’s a vision that directly contradicts the founding ethos of Web3: that power should be distributed, not concentrated. When Trump says “American AI must lead,” he’s implicitly endorsing a model where capital and regulation are weaponized to crush any alternative—including decentralized compute networks that could democratize access to AI.
I’ve been in this space since 2017, when I audited the OmniChain whitepaper and saw how tokenomics could betray egalitarian promises. That experience taught me to read between the lines of political rhetoric. Trump’s policy is not just about AI—it’s about who controls the infrastructure. His promise to “avoid regulatory obstacles” is code for: let the incumbents build without friction. His call for “new power plants” signals a preference for massive, centralized energy generation (likely natural gas or nuclear), not the modular, distributed energy grids that could support a decentralized compute network.
The core of the problem is compute. Today, the most powerful AI models are trained on vast GPU clusters owned by a few companies. Trump’s plan would accelerate this concentration by subsidizing their energy costs and streamlining their permitting. Meanwhile, decentralized compute networks like Akash, Render, or io.net struggle to compete because they rely on smaller, less efficient nodes, and they face regulatory uncertainty that Trump’s “de-regulation” explicitly ignores.
Let me be clear: Trump’s AI policy is a massive subsidy for centralized compute monopolies. It will make it cheaper and faster for Big Tech to build more data centers, sucking up more of the world’s energy and talent. It will not, however, make AI more trustworthy, more transparent, or more aligned with human values. In fact, it will do the opposite—by removing safety guardrails, it will increase the risk of AI systems that are opaque, biased, and prone to catastrophic failure.
But here’s the contrarian angle:Trump’s accelerationism might actually create the conditions for decentralized compute to thrive—if we are smart about it. When the centralized system becomes too expensive, too hot, and too politically toxic, communities will look for alternatives. The backlash against data center energy consumption is already growing. In my 2022 burnout in Yilan, I realized that trust is the only protocol that cannot be coded. Decentralized networks can offer a trust-based alternative to the kind of brute-force AI that Trump is championing.
I’ve been advising builders on this for years. In 2024, I founded The Alignment Circle, a community of 2,000 members focused on ethical governance. One of our key insights is that regulatory resistance is not the same as regulatory harmony. Trump’s policy will create a vacuum in safety and ethics, which decentralized governance models can fill. We don’t need more users; we need more stewards. The stewards of decentralized AI will be the ones who build transparent, community-owned compute networks that don’t require a president’s blessing.
Takeaway:Trump’s AI policy is a powerful tailwind for centralized monopolies, but it is also a clarion call for the decentralized alternative. The next few years will test whether we can build a compute infrastructure that is not just fast and cheap, but also resilient and ethical. We built not for the peak, but for the valley. The peak is Trump’s promise—a short-term boom for hyperscalers. The valley is where the real work of building for the long term happens. Are we ready?