China Is Building Smarter AI While America Builds Empty Data Centers | 5/21/26

Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz

Blaze Media

News, News Commentary, Politics, Society & Culture

4.8 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

America is being sold a massive lie and false choice about AI and data centers. I sit down with computer scientist and AI expert Jim Calhoun to expose why the push for hyperscale AI data centers may have little to do with innovation — and everything to do with centralized control, land-grabs, surveillance infrastructure, and corporate power. While politicians and Big Tech claim America must build massive AI data centers to compete with China, Calhoun explains why China and most other countries are actually moving toward localized edge computing, sovereign AI, distributed architectures, and efficient open-source systems instead of centralized cloud dependency. Calhoun explains how open-weight models and sovereign AI can accomplish more while also helping protect your privacy, keep your data local, and prevent corporate and government overreach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Politics without the soap opera with unfiltered constitutional conservative truth.
0:06.2	The Conservative Review with Daniel Burns.
0:09.2	And welcome back fellow American Patriots and Minutemen standing at the ready to fight anew for the issues that matter today on this Thursday.
0:19.3	It is May 21st.
0:20.3	We'll be off tomorrow for a long Memorial Day weekend on the special 250th anniversary. We'll get to that later. But for now, the biggest issue is the biggest lie about the biggest issue. The notion that we need thousands of data centers over one to 10 gigawatts each in every
0:42.1	county of America and then scale exponentially from there and there and there, which will never
0:47.1	happen in order to succeed at artificial intelligence, at computing and technology, it cannot be
0:53.7	farther from the truth.
0:54.8	We've talked a lot about the harms and unsustainability of what they're doing.
0:59.8	But there's also the basic premise in the computing and the technology itself that
1:06.2	sits at the nexus of the lie, the notion that China is even competing in cloud-based computing
1:13.0	to the extent we are, the notion that that is the only and best and most efficient way of
1:17.6	pursuing AI.
1:19.0	And in fact, the reality is that the opposite is true.
1:22.5	They're making us lose the race with China.
1:26.3	China, according to our guests coming up in the second part of this show, China is building
1:31.8	code while we build concrete and doing so on farmland and just stupidly.
1:38.2	So we're going to get to the computing side of this, but I just want to start off with
1:43.5	the political side and the land use side.
1:47.1	We'll do a little bit of both today.
1:49.0	First of all, I just want to say candidates are not running enough against data centers.
1:53.4	We're finding that rhinos are winning everywhere.
	...

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