Mark Cuban says the AI arms race explains why Zuck, Musk, and Dell have cozied up to Trump — and why it may pay off (www.businessinsider.com)

Mark Cuban argues that the recent public embrace of Donald Trump by major tech CEOs is less about politics and more about survival in an escalating AI arms race. Speaking on a podcast, he framed executives’ overtures to the White House as strategic moves to secure a favorable environment for an industry racing for compute, talent, and regulatory advantage—one that pits U.S. companies against China and rivals like Gemini (Google), Meta’s models, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok and Perplexity. The Rose Garden dinner, where Sam Altman, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg praised the administration and Google announced a $1B education push (including $150M in AI grants), made that courtship visible; Cuban pointed out Meta’s multibillion-dollar annual spend (he cited ~$50B/year) as the kind of capital intensity driving CEOs to prioritize long-term AI dominance over short political optics. For the AI/ML community this matters because national policy, access to data centers, funding and permissive regulation materially affect who can build and scale frontier models. The signals coming from the White House can accelerate investments in U.S. infrastructure and R&D, influence talent flows, and shape norms for safety and competition. Cuban’s view highlights a pragmatic calculus: a president’s term may be temporary, but control over compute, datasets and deployment pathways could define technical leadership — and the standards and risks — for generations.