Ramsey Cardy
- Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said China is ahead of the US on AI-related energy projects.
- Feldman said that the US needs the federal government to do more to support AI.
- He said that one starting point could be a 5-year moratorium on state and local AI regulations.
China’s centralized government is giving Beijing a leg up in a key part of the artificial intelligence race, according to the CEO of Cerebras.
“Our decentralized form of government has left us with sort of a patchwork of power infrastructures where even if the federal government wants to support you, their local regulations like at the city and county level of towns that can interfere with a project and set a project back, billions of dollars,” Andrew Feldman said during a recent appearance on Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast.
In an interview with Business Insider, Feldman expanded on his view that local regulations are holding back major AI-related infrastructure projects like energy production.
“I think they have been able to, at a national level, stand up vast amounts of power, and they’ve done it by building massive dams, by burning coal, by doubling down on solar,” the CEO said. “But they have put together an extraordinary power infrastructure, and I think the plan benefited from some form of central decision-making.”
Feldman said the US shouldn’t try to simply steal China’s playbook, but rather find better ways to support AI investments through the existing system.
“We have a fragmented political system, but there is no reason why we should have local ordinances interfering with the development of power projects, with the development of data centers, the very sort of things that power big AI deployments,” he said. “There’s no reason we should have a patchwork of AI regulations, meaning that each company, like Cerebras or OpenAI, has to think differently in each state; that’s just a tax on innovation.”
Feldman said a moratorium on state-level AI laws, similar to the one Sen. Ted Cruz pushed unsuccessfully earlier this year, would be a good step. Cruz’s initial policy, which was ultimately stripped out of President Donald Trump’s “One Bill Beautiful Bill,” would have blocked state and local AI laws for a decade.
“I think maybe a 5-year moratorium would be a nice starting point with an option to renew on five,” Feldman said. “I think industry is moving fast; this market is moving unbelievably quickly. I think we should do things that advantage our AI companies, both large and small. I don’t think it’s enough to advantage just the largest.”
As a chipmaker, Cerebras is in the thick of the AI race. Unlike Nvidia, which dominates the GPU market, Cerebras makes massive chips specifically designed for AI, roughly the size of a dinner plate. The company had planned to go public, but last week formally filed to withdraw its IPO. Feldman has said that Cerebras still intends to go public but wants to update its filing.
“Given that the business has improved in meaningful ways we decided to withdraw so that we can re-file with updated financials, strategy information including our approach to the rapidly changing AI landscape,” he wrote on LinkedIn on Sunday.
Feldman doesn’t see the US gaining ground in the AI race by making China more reliant on an American tech stack, a view that conflicts with the likes of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Huang is trying to get the Trump administration to sign off on approval for Nvidia to sell more advanced chips to Chinese companies.
Instead, Feldman would like to see the US do more to incentivize European allies, along with Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
“I think there is a much richer debate to be had whether we should be selling them down rev technologies and that may or may not be the right thing to do, but we should absolutely not sell our absolute best to a political adversary,” Feldman said.