President Trump has been on something of an AI publicity tour lately, and his messaging is consistent: artificial intelligence isn’t just another tech trend, it’s the main event. During remarks at a White House gathering on August 19, Trump declared that AI could be “bigger than the internet, bigger than anything anyone’s seen.”
The pitch: AI as the new oil
In an August 7 interview with Punchbowl News, he went further, saying AI is “bigger than the internet by many times” and suggesting that companies dedicated to the technology could eventually rival the oil industry in scale and influence.
In a July 2026 CNBC interview, Trump zeroed in on the energy dimension, arguing that the US needs to double its energy capacity to support the data centers powering machine learning and AI capabilities. His pitch was explicitly competitive: without that energy buildout, China wins.
Policy machinery behind the rhetoric
