Sanders' 7 trillion dollar AI fund + a grid fast-lane for data centers

Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would force any company earning over 200 million dollars in annual AI revenue to hand half its shares to a federally managed fund — a pool he estimates at 7 trillion dollars. A required 5 percent dividend would send every American more than 1,000 dollars a year, with the remainder funding health care, education, and housing. An independent, Senate-confirmed commission would run it, and firms blending AI and non-AI businesses would have to split them so the public stake covers only the AI side.

In a unanimous vote, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered the six largest US grid operators to justify or rewrite the rules that govern how AI data centers and other big power users connect to the transmission system. Operators have 30 days to report available capacity and 60 days to defend their regional rates, with data centers footing their own interconnection costs. The orders speed up connections but leave the deeper problem untouched — there still is not enough generating capacity, and data-center demand is on track to nearly triple by 2035.

Amazon is in talks to sell its in-house Trainium chips directly to outside data centers for the first time, breaking from years of reserving them for AWS cloud customers. AI chief Peter DeSantis confirmed the discussions in Paris but named no buyers, pointing to rising demand — especially in Europe — to keep AI compute under local control. CEO Andy Jassy has called the homegrown chip business an opportunity worth 50 billion dollars a year; pulling it off would put Amazon in direct hardware competition with Nvidia for the first time.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ASML executives that Washington believes one of the company's extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines — the kind banned from export to China — may have ended up there, Bloomberg reported. ASML pushed back hard, circulating a document titled "No indication of any ASML EUV system in China" and noting it has never shipped an EUV system, component, or module to the country. No evidence of an actual transfer has been made public, and the systems weigh roughly 180 metric tons, making a quiet move unlikely.

Baseten is reportedly raising 1.5 billion dollars at a valuation of 13 billion dollars, only five months after it raised 300 million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation — a jump of roughly 160 percent in under half a year. The company runs AI inference, the step where a trained model actually answers a prompt, and trims costs by routing each request to the most efficient open-source model. Venture investors are piling into this inference layer as serving AI, not training it, becomes the biggest cost for most AI products.

General Intuition, a startup spun out of the game-clip platform Medal, is in talks to raise 300 million dollars at a valuation just above 2 billion dollars, drawing new backers Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt alongside Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. It trains AI agents to reason about space and motion using Medal's feed of 2 billion gameplay videos a year — the dataset OpenAI once tried to buy. Rather than sell world models outright, it plans to ship agents that perceive and act in real time, with a first product due by late summer.