Hinman sounds the alarm on America’s need to accelerate investment in clean energy and critical minerals supply chains or risk ceding strategic ground to adversaries.
In a new Washington AI Network podcast interview with Tammy Haddad, Silverado Policy Accelerator Co-Founder and Chair Maureen Hinman warns that America’s AI ambitions could be constrained not by technology but by energy shortages, critical-mineral dependencies, and a permitting process that struggles to keep pace with innovation. “The real AI race isn’t about algorithms,” says Hinman.
Hinman says America must accelerate investment in energy infrastructure and critical minerals supply chains or risk ceding strategic ground to its competitors.
In an interview recorded live at the Special Competitive Studies Project‘s 2026 AI+ Expo, Hinman assessed where America stands relative to China and what it will take to stay ahead as Congress weighs the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act. Hinman is a veteran of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Hinman’s central warning centers on energy. AI data centers and hyperscalers, she said, are driving demand that the current grid cannot meet. “By 2030, we’re going to easily need 800 to 1,000 more power plants in America alone,” she said, adding that these are not small facilities but “100 megawatt power plants.”
The United States’ edge in artificial intelligence will be decided less in research labs than in power plants, mineral processing facilities, and permitting offices, according to Maureen Hinman, executive chair and co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, and her prescription is what she calls “clean baseload” – round-the-clock power from nuclear, hydro, geothermal, and gas paired with carbon capture. She also pointed to fusion as a near-term breakthrough rather than a distant one. “Fusion is game-changing because you have the ability to decouple energy from geography – that’s never been done in history,” she said, predicting commercial viability within five years.
As communities from Northern Virginia to the West Coast organize against new data center projects, Hinman argued the industry and local leaders have failed to make the economic case. While a facility itself may only sustain “20 to 50 jobs” to operate, she said the real value lies in what gets built around it.
“If you are bringing in water, which you need for a data center, and you’re bringing in energy and also the conducting infrastructure that you need to move that energy around, you have now created the foundational circumstances by which lots of other economic activities can happen there,” Hinman said. “Maybe data centers are going to employ a few people, but if you have a lot of energy going to a certain location and you have water and you’ve got that infrastructure, other businesses are going to spring up because there is going to be economies of scale.”
On supply chains, Hinman flagged processing – not extraction – as the real vulnerability, noting that China controls a dominant share of global capacity for materials like graphite. “China tends to control between 75 and 98 percent for some things like graphite, which is the world’s processing capacity,” she said. “That’s a choke point. It’s a big problem.”
She pointed to recycling as an underused third lever, particularly as discarded electronics flow overseas. “We’re sending a lot of used electronics over to China. They are pulling those high-quality materials out of those electronics and using them in their own sector,” Hinman said. “We should be keeping those resources at home. It is a resource.”
Hinman, who praised the consistency of U.S. trade-defense strategy under USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer across multiple administrations, said Washington has clung to flawed assumptions in its competition with Beijing: that market innovation alone can outpace state subsidies, that allies will reliably side with the U.S., and that “no” is not an acceptable policy outcome.
That last point, she said, is the most consequential. “You can be a system maker or a system taker,” Hinman said. “And if you are always going along to get along, you’re going to be a system taker, because the obstinacy of our adversary is much more resolute — they don’t have the democracy problem. People can’t say what they think. And so we have to be really clear about what our goals are and the kind of system we want.”
Hinman reserved some of her sharpest criticism for the federal permitting process, arguing that environmental review rules like NEPA have long outlived their original purpose now that standalone environmental law exists. “NEPA, get rid of it, because you already have environmental compliance,” she said. “Why am I forcing you to sit in an eight-year environmental permitting process?”
She framed the broader challenge as one of political will rather than technical capacity. “I think permitting is long overdue in this country and most countries,” she said, calling for regulators to “start from scratch and talk about the economy we have today and what our needs are today.”
The full conversation is available on the Washington AI Network Podcast, with video on YouTube and audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major platforms.
Silverado Policy Accelerator is a bipartisan policy organization focused on strengthening America’s competitiveness in strategic technologies, economic security, and national resilience. Through research, convenings, and policy recommendations, Silverado brings together leaders from government, industry, and academia to address challenges ranging from artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure to critical minerals, supply chains, and national security.