The global race for computational power is well underway, fueled by a worldwide boom in artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is seeking to raise as much as $7 trillion for a chipmaking venture. Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are building AI chips of their own. The need for more computing horsepower to train and use AI models—fueling a quest for everything from cutting-edge chips to giant data sets—isn’t just a current source of geopolitical leverage (as with US curbs on chip exports to China). It is also shaping the way nations will grow and compete in the future, with governments from India to the UK developing national strategies and stockpiling Nvidia graphics processing units. 

I believe it’s high time for America to have its own national compute strategy: an Apollo program for the age of AI.

In January, under President Biden’s executive order on AI, the National Science Foundation launched a pilot program for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), envisioned as a “shared research infrastructure” to provide AI computing power, access to open government and nongovernment data sets, and training resources to students and AI researchers. 

The NAIRR pilot, while incredibly important, is just an initial step. The NAIRR Task Force’s final report, published last year, outlined an eventual $2.6 billion budget required to operate the NAIRR over six years. That’s far from enough—and even then, it remains to be seen if Congress will authorize the NAIRR beyond the pilot.

Meanwhile, much more needs to be done to expand the government’s access to computing power and to deploy AI in the nation’s service. Advanced computing is now core to the security and prosperity of our nation; we need it to optimize national intelligence, pursue scientific breakthroughs like fusion reactions, accelerate advanced materials discovery, ensure the cybersecurity of our financial markets and critical infrastructure, and more. The federal government played a pivotal role in enabling the last century’s major technological breakthroughs by providing the core research infrastructure, like particle accelerators for high-energy physics in the 1960s and supercomputing centers in the 1980s. 

Now, with other nations around the world devoting sustained, ambitious government investment to high-performance AI computing, we can’t risk falling behind. It’s a race to power the most world-altering technology in human history. 

First, more dedicated government AI supercomputers need to be built for an array of missions ranging from classified intelligence processing to advanced biological computing. In the modern era, computing capabilities and technical progress have proceeded in lockstep. 

Over the past decade, the US has successfully pushed classic scientific computing into the exascale era with the Frontier, Aurora, and soon-to-arrive El Capitan machines—massive computers that can perform over a quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second. Over the next decade, the power of AI models is projected to increase by a factor of 1,000 to 10,000, and leading compute architectures may be capable of training a 500-trillion-parameter AI model in a week (for comparison, GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters). Supporting research at this scale will require more powerful and dedicated AI research infrastructure, significantly better algorithms, and more investment. 

Although the US currently still has the lead in advanced computing, other countries are nearing parity and set on overtaking us. China, for example, aims to boost its aggregate computing power more than 50% by 2025, and it has been reported that the country plans to have 10 exascale systems by 2025. We cannot risk acting slowly. 

Second, while some may argue for using existing commercial cloud platforms instead of building a high-performance federal computing infrastructure, I believe a hybrid model is necessary. Studies have shown significant long-term cost savings from using federal computing instead of commercial cloud services. In the near term, scaling up cloud computing offers quick, streamlined base-level access for projects—that’s the approach the NAIRR pilot is embracing, with contributions from both industry and federal agencies. In the long run, however, procuring and operating powerful government-owned AI supercomputers with a dedicated mission of supporting US public-sector needs will set the stage for a time when AI is much more ubiquitous and central to our national security and prosperity. 

Such an expanded federal infrastructure can also benefit the public. The life cycle of the government’s computing clusters has traditionally been about seven years, after which new systems are built and old ones decommissioned. Inevitably, as newer cutting-edge GPUs emerge, hardware refreshes will phase out older supercomputers and chips, which can then be recycled for lower-intensity research and nonprofit use—thus adding cost-effective computing resources for civilian purposes. While universities and the private sector have driven most AI progress thus far, a fully distributed model will increasingly face computing constraints as demand soars. In a survey by MIT and the nonprofit US Council on Competitiveness of some of the biggest computing users in the country, 84% of respondents said they faced computation bottlenecks in running key programs. America will need big investments from the federal government to stay ahead.

Third, any national compute strategy must go hand in hand with a talent strategy. The government can better compete with the private sector for AI talent by offering workers an opportunity to tackle national security challenges using world-class computational infrastructure. To ensure that the nation has available a large and sophisticated workforce for these highly technical, specialized roles in developing and implementing AI, America must also recruit and retain the best global students. Crucial to this effort will be creating clear immigration pathways—for example, exempting PhD holders in relevant technical fields from the current H-1B visa cap. We’ll need the brightest minds to fundamentally reimagine how computation takes place and spearhead novel paradigms that can shape AI for the public good, push forward the technology’s boundaries, and deliver its gains to all.

America has long benefitted from its position as the global driver of innovation in advanced computing. Just as the Apollo program galvanized our country to win the space race, setting national ambitions for compute will not just bolster our AI competitiveness in the decades ahead but also drive R&D breakthroughs across practically all sectors with greater access. Advanced computing architecture can’t be erected overnight. Let’s start laying the groundwork now.

Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011. In 2024, Eric & Wendy co-founded Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic venture to fund unconventional areas of exploration in science & tech. 

It wasn’t exactly surprising when on Wednesday, May 8, a Hong Kong appeals court sided with the city government to take down “Glory to Hong Kong” from the internet. The trial, in which no one represented the defense, was the culmination of a years-long battle over a song that has become the unofficial anthem for protesters fighting China’s tightening control and police brutality in the city. But it remains an open question how exactly Big Tech will respond. Even as the injunction is narrowly designed to make it easier for them to comply, these Western companies may be seen as aiding authoritarian control and obstructing internet freedom if they do so.  

Google, Apple, Meta, Spotify, and others have spent the last several years largely refusing to cooperate with previous efforts by the Hong Kong government to prevent the spread of the song, which the government has claimed is a threat to national security. But the government has also hesitated to leverage criminal law to force them to comply with requests for removal of content, which could risk international uproar and hurt the city’s economy. 

Now, the new ruling seemingly finds a third option: imposing a civil injunction that doesn’t invoke criminal prosecution, which is similar to how copyright violations are enforced. Theoretically, the platforms may face less reputational blowback when they comply with this court order.

“If you look closely at the judgment, it’s basically tailor-made for the tech companies at stake,” says Chung Ching Kwong, a senior analyst at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an advocacy organization that connects legislators from over 30 countries working on relations with China. She believes the language in the judgment suggests the tech companies will now be ready to comply with the government’s request.

A Google spokesperson said the company is reviewing the court’s judgment and didn’t respond to specific questions sent by MIT Technology Review. A Meta spokesperson pointed to a statement from Jeff Paine, the managing director of the Asia Internet Coalition, a trade group representing many tech companies in the Asia-Pacific region: “[The AIC] is assessing the implications of the decision made today, including how the injunction will be implemented, to determine its impact on businesses. We believe that a free and open internet is fundamental to the city’s ambitions to become an international technology and innovation hub.” The AIC did not immediately reply to questions sent via email. Apple and Spotify didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

But no matter what these companies do next, the ruling is already having an effect. Just over 24 hours after the court order, some of the 32 YouTube videos that are explicitly targeted in the injunction were inaccessible for users worldwide, not just in Hong Kong. 

While it’s unclear whether the videos were removed by the platform or by their creators, experts say the court decision will almost certainly set a precedent for more content to be censored from Hong Kong’s internet in the future.

“Censorship of the song would be a clear violation of internet freedom and freedom of expression,” says Yaqiu Wang, the research director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House, a human rights advocacy group. “Google and other internet companies should use all available channels to challenge the decision.” 

Erasing a song from the internet

Since “Glory to Hong Kong” was first uploaded to YouTube in August 2019 by an anonymous group called Dgx Music, it’s been adored by protesters and applauded as their anthem. Its popularity only grew after China passed the harsh Hong Kong national security law in 2020. 

With lyrics like “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” it’s no surprise that it became a major flash point. The city and national Chinese governments were wary of its spread. 

Their fears escalated when the song was repeatedly mistaken for China’s national anthem at international events and was broadcast at sporting events after Hong Kong athletes won. By mid-2023 the mistake, intentional or not, had happened 887 times, according to the Hong Kong government’s request for the content’s removal, which cites YouTube videos and Google search results referring to the song as the “Hong Kong National Anthem” as the reason. 

The government has been arresting people for performing the song on the ground in Hong Kong, but it has been harder to prosecute the online activity since most of the videos and music were uploaded anonymously, and Hong Kong, unlike mainland China, has historically had a free internet. This meant officials needed to explore new approaches to content removal. 

To comply or not to comply

Using the controversial 2020 national security law as legal justification to make requests for removal of certain content that it deems threatening, the Hong Kong government has been able to exert pressure on local companies, like internet service providers. “In Hong Kong, all the major internet service providers are locally owned or Chinese-owned. For business reasons, probably within the last 20 years, most of the foreign investors like Verizon left on their own,” says Charles Mok, a researcher at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and a former legislator in Hong Kong. “So right now, the government is focusing on telling the customer-facing internet service providers to do the blocking.” And it seems to have been somewhat effective, with a few websites for human rights organizations becoming inaccessible locally.

But the city government can’t get its way as easily when the content is on foreign-owned platforms like YouTube or Facebook. Back in 2020, most major Western companies declared they would pause processing data requests from the Hong Kong government while they assessed the law. Over time, some of them have started answering government requests again. But they’ve largely remained firm: over the first six months of 2023, for example, Meta received 41 requests from the Hong Kong government to obtain user data and answered none; during the same period, Google received requests to remove 164 items from Google services and ended up removing 82 of them, according to both companies’ transparency reports. Google specifically mentioned that it chose to not remove two YouTube videos and one Google Drive file related to “Glory to Hong Kong.”

Both sides are in tight spots. Tech companies don’t want to lose the Hong Kong market or endanger their local staff, but they are also worried about being seen as complying with authoritarian government actions. And the Hong Kong government doesn’t want to be seen as openly fighting Western platforms while trust in the region’s financial markets is already in decline. In particular, officials fear international headlines if the government invokes criminal law to force tech companies to remove certain content. 

“I think both sides are navigating this balancing act. So the government finally figured out a way that they thought might be able to solve the impasse: by going to the court and narrowly seeking an injunction,” Mok says.

That happened in June 2023, when Hong Kong’s government requested a court injunction to ban the distribution of the song online with the purpose of “inciting others to commit secession.” It named 32 YouTube videos explicitly, including the original version and live performances, translations into other languages, instrumental and opera versions, and an interview with the original creators. But the order would also cover “any adaptation of the song, the melody and/or lyrics of which are substantially the same as the song,” according to court documents. 

The injunction went through a year of back-and-forth hearings, including a lower court ruling that briefly swatted down the ban. But now, the Court of Appeal has granted the government approval. The case can theoretically be appealed one last time, but with no defendants present, that’s unlikely to happen.

The key difference between this action and previous attempts to remove content is that this is a civil injunction, not a criminal prosecution—meaning it is, at least legally speaking, closer to a copyright takedown request. A platform could arguably be less likely to take a reputational hit if it removes the content upon request. 

Kwong believes this will indeed make platforms more likely to cooperate, and there have already been pretty clear signs to that effect. In one hearing in December, the government was asked by the court to consult online platforms as to the feasibility of the injunction. The final judgment this week says that while the platforms “have not taken part in these proceedings, they have indicated that they are ready to accede to the Government’s request if there is a court order.”

“The actual targets in this case, mainly the tech giants, may have less hesitation to comply with a civil court order than a national security order because if it’s the latter, they may also face backfire from the US,” says Eric Yan-Ho Lai, a research fellow at Georgetown Center for Asian Law. 

Lai also says now that the injunction is granted, it will be easier to prosecute an individual based on violation of a civil injunction rather than prosecuting someone for criminal offenses, since the government won’t need to prove criminal intent.

The chilling effect

Immediately after the injunction, human rights advocates called on tech companies to remain committed to their values. “Companies like Google and Apple have repeatedly claimed that they stand by the universal right to freedom of expression. They should put their ideals into practice,” says Freedom House’s Wang. “Google and other tech companies should thoroughly document government demands, and publish detailed transparency reports on content takedowns, both for those initiated by the authorities and those done by the companies themselves.”

Without making their plans clear, it’s too early to know just how tech companies will react. But right after the injunction was granted, the song largely remained available for Hong Kong users on most platforms, including YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify, according to the South China Morning Post. On iTunes, the song even returned to the top of the download rankings a few hours after the injunction.

One key factor that may still determine corporate cooperation is how far the content removal requests go. There will surely be more videos of the song that are uploaded to YouTube, not to mention independent websites hosting the videos and music for more people to access. Will the government go after each of them too?

The Hong Kong government has previously said in court hearings that it seeks only local restriction of the online content, meaning content will be inaccessible only to users physically in the city. Large platforms like YouTube can do that without difficulty. 

Theoretically, this allows local residents to circumvent the ban by using VPN software, but not everyone is technologically savvy enough to do so. And that wouldn’t do much to minimize the larger chilling effect on free speech, says Kwong from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. 

“As a Hong Konger living abroad, I do rely on Hong Kong services or international services based in Hong Kong to get ahold of what’s happening in the city. I do use YouTube Hong Kong to see certain things, and I do use Spotify Hong Kong or Apple Music because I want access to Cantopop,” she says. “At the same time, you worry about what you can share with friends in Hong Kong and whatnot. We don’t want to put them into trouble by sharing things that they are not supposed to see, which they should be able to see.”

The court made at least two explicit exemptions to the song’s ban, for “lawful activities conducted in connection with the song, such as those for the purpose of academic activity and news activity.” But even the implementation of these could be incredibly complex and confusing in practice. “In the current political context in Hong Kong, I don’t see anyone willing to take the risk,” Kwong says. 

The government has already arrested prominent journalists on accusations of endangering national security, and a new law passed in 2024 has expanded the crimes that can be prosecuted on national security grounds. As with all efforts to suppress free speech, the impact of vague boundaries that encourage self-censorship on potentially sensitive topics is often sprawling and hard to measure. 

“Nobody knows where the actual red line is,” Kwong says.