ALFA Field Notes

NVIDIA's GTC Bombshells: AI Acceleration Beyond All Expectations

NVIDIA founder & CEO Jensen Huang dropped several game-changing announcements this week at their annual event, GTC, which signaled the continued reshaping of America's technological landscape. Here are a few of the big takeaways:

• AI computational demands are now "easily 100 times more than we thought we needed this time last year" due to advances in reasoning capabilities. This isn't incremental growth – it's exponential acceleration.

• But NVIDIA isn't just talking about demand – they're backing it with unprecedented commitment to American manufacturing. Jensen announced plans to invest "several hundred billion [dollars]" specifically for US-made chips in the next four years with their manufacturing partners. This represents a massive vote of confidence in domestic semiconductor production and a strategic repositioning of critical tech supply chains.

• NVIDIA's partnerships are also transformative. Their newly announced collaboration with GM rounds out "AI for manufacturing...AI for enterprise...and AI for in the car," with every line of their 7 million lines of code undergoing rigorous safety assessment.

• The company has also announced a new quantum research center in Boston that will "will integrate leading quantum hardware with AI supercomputers, enabling what is known as accelerated quantum supercomputing." The Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center will bring together experts in the fields of Quantum Computing from both private companies and public institutions such as MIT and Harvard.

The message is clear: AI's trajectory has steepened, and NVIDIA is positioning the United States to lead this technological revolution with massive investments, critical partnerships, and an accelerated timeline for transformative capabilities for American industry and the American people.

The EU Just Fired Another Shot at American Tech Leadership

While Vice President Vance was in Paris last month delivering America's clear message on technological sovereignty, Brussels bureaucrats were busy preparing their next salvo against American innovation. Yesterday, they launched it. The European Commission hit Google with two charges under their so-called Digital Markets Act and ordered Apple to open its ecosystem to rivals — a direct assault on the intellectual property that powers America's most valuable companies and builds our technological future. Make no mistake: this isn't about "consumer protection" or "fair competition." It's about hamstringing American tech giants while Europe fails to produce innovations of its own.

These actions suggest EU regulators weren't listening when Vice President Vance said Western technological primacy must remain in Western hands, with America leading the charge. European regulatory overreach threatens this vision by tying down our most innovative companies with red tape and forcing them to surrender their competitive advantages.

While Google and Apple push back against these rulings — with Google noting that the EU's demands would "make it harder for people to find what they are looking for and reduce traffic to European businesses" — they shouldn't have to fight alone. The good news: the Trump administration has already signaled it won't stand idly by. American technological leadership is a national security priority, not a bargaining chip in Europe's regulatory games.

Private Mobile Carrier Launched

One of the demos at this week’s Manifest: Demo Day was privacy-first mobile carrier, Cape. And just a few days after they took the stage to demonstrate its capabilities, Cape launched its open beta to the public.

From their announcement: “Traditional carriers collect excessive data and prioritize interoperability over security, leaving you vulnerable to threats like SIM swaps, signaling attacks, and mass surveillance. Cape takes a different approach. We built a secure, private cell network designed to keep your information where it belongs—with you.”

After originally only being offered to “government agencies and high risk individuals”, the company saw significant commercial demand for a mobile carrier that doesn’t track or sell your data, and provides secure messaging.

Over the years the public has become numb to cyber attacks on our communications networks — most notably the Salt Typhoon attack. But resigning ourselves to the fact that foreign entities will access our private networks cannot be the norm, and Cape is working to provide our citizens a different path.