Trump AI czar Sacks says 'no federal bailout for AI' after OpenAI CFO's comments (www.cnbc.com)

David Sacks, President Trump’s appointed AI and crypto czar, publicly rejected the idea of a federal “bailout” for artificial intelligence after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar mentioned a possible federal “backstop” for infrastructure financing during a conference. Friar later clarified on LinkedIn that she wasn’t asking for a government guarantee and meant that sustaining U.S. tech leadership will require public and private roles—private equity, banks and government working together—to build industrial-scale compute capacity. Sacks pushed back on X, arguing the U.S. already has multiple “frontier model” companies and that if one firm fails others will fill the gap, while the administration will instead pursue easier permitting and power expansion to enable rapid infrastructure buildouts without hiking residential electricity rates. For the AI/ML community the exchange signals clear policy priorities: do not expect direct federal guarantees for company-specific infrastructure financing, but do expect regulatory and energy-policy moves to smooth construction and operation of large-scale data centers. That matters because training and running frontier models demands massive capital, power and physical infrastructure; without government backstops, financing will lean on private equity, banks and corporate balance sheets, shaping risk, consolidation and competitive dynamics. The administration’s emphasis on streamlined permitting and grid capacity could materially lower barriers to deploying compute at scale even while maintaining market-based risk allocation.