Scott Bessent Warns US 'Can't Pause' AI Race With China: 'There Is No Day After Tomorrow' if Beijing Wins
Scott Bessent defended the U.S. AI race with China while criticizing data centers over growing community opposition.
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CNBC traders picked FTAI Aviation, KLA and Oracle as final trades, while praising NVIDIA’s Hugging Face deal.
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Scott Bessent defended the U.S. AI race with China while criticizing data centers over growing community opposition.
The article argues that the current AI buildout, representing the largest industrial expansion since 19th-century railroads, is fundamentally different from the 1990s internet bubble. Unlike the dot-com era where 90% of fiber infrastructure sat unused and 75% of IPOs operated at losses, today's AI companies are profitable, have reasonable valuations, and their hardware is in high demand with premium pricing. This suggests the AI boom has a stronger economic foundation than the internet bubble.
Tech investor James Altucher claims Elon Musk is positioning to dominate artificial intelligence through a combination of proprietary chip manufacturing (Terafab), a merger of his AI and space companies, and end-to-end control of AI infrastructure. Altucher argues this opportunity could outsize Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI combined and represents a once-in-a-generation technological shift.
Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller holds positions in Amazon and Alphabet for AI infrastructure exposure, but his largest U.S. stock holding is Natera, a genetic diagnostics company that has returned approximately 10x since his initial investment in Q3 2022. Druckenmiller sold his Nvidia position in early 2024 due to valuation concerns and now holds Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing as his AI semiconductor bet instead.
ServiceNow's AI business surpassed $1B in ACV in Q2 2026 with 40%+ sequential growth, and subscription revenues rose 24.5% to $3.88B. However, intensifying competition from Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce in enterprise AI and workflow automation, combined with margin pressure from acquisitions and a premium valuation (8X forward P/S), has led to a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) rating.
Oracle's $300 billion OpenAI deal makes it an AGI infrastructure proxy. Thursday's earnings will test cloud growth and backlog conversion.