The Trump AI Pivot — Biden's Order Rescinded, Stargate's $500 Billion Pledge

On 20 January 2025 the second Donald Trump administration took office. Within the first day, US AI policy shifted decisively.

Over the three days that followed, the AI regulatory framework built by the Biden administration was rescinded, the largest AI-infrastructure investment programme in history was announced, and a new executive order positioning "American AI leadership" as national strategy was signed.

20 January — Rescinding Biden's EO 14110

Immediately after the inauguration, the Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions was signed, revoking dozens of Biden-era executive orders. Among them was Executive Order 14110, Biden's October 2023 order on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.

The rescission removed:

• Reporting obligations for large AI models (above the 10²⁶ FLOPs compute threshold)
• NIST's mandate to develop AI safety evaluation guidelines
• Federal agencies' AI risk assessment duties

The official rationale was that "regulation slows AI development and undermines US competitiveness". Major industry firms welcomed it publicly; safety-leaning researchers and a portion of the regulatory community criticised it sharply.

21 January — The Stargate Project

The next day, President Trump stood at the White House with Sam Altman (OpenAI), Larry Ellison (Oracle co-founder), and Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) to announce the Stargate Project.

Its outline:

• Backers: OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX, the UAE technology investor.
• Scale: US$100 billion immediately, up to US$500 billion over four years.
• Purpose: AI-dedicated data centres, power infrastructure, and semiconductor manufacturing lines—all within the United States.
• First site: a Stargate campus under construction in Abilene, Texas, with plans to scale across more than ten sites.
• Employment: claimed to generate "hundreds of thousands" of US jobs.

At US$500 billion, this is the largest single private AI-infrastructure programme in history. For scale: more than half the annual US defence budget (≈US$800 billion); roughly twice the inflation-adjusted total of the Apollo programme (≈US$250 billion).

The technical community split. To some, evidence that the US was getting serious about competing with China. To others, evidence that the US could now keep an edge only through brute scale. Several questioned whether US$500 billion would actually move—Elon Musk publicly noted that SoftBank does not hold US$500 billion to commit.

23 January — A New Executive Order

On 23 January, Trump signed Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.

It declared as national policy that "American AI must remain the world's gold standard", instructed agencies to review and remove guidance written under EO 14110 within 180 days, directed deregulation and acceleration of AI adoption, and tasked the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with producing an "AI Action Plan" within 180 days.

The principal axis of US AI policy turned officially from safety-first to dominance-first.

Five Days Later — The DeepSeek Shock

Four days after Stargate was announced, on 27 January, DeepSeek-R1 hit the market and NVIDIA lost US$589 billion in a single day.

"Four days after the US pledges $500 billion, China releases a comparable model for $5.6 million." That contrast cast doubt on Stargate's scale-first thesis. Congressional debate followed: is the colossal infrastructure spend really necessary, and is the assumption that deregulation restores US lead still valid?

Stargate has continued anyway. The first phase of the Abilene site went online by April 2025; expansions to Ohio, Oklahoma, and Oregon were announced in May.

From Regulation to Development — A US Doctrine

The Trump administration's AI policy, through this sequence of documents and announcements, took on a clear shape:

• Domestic deregulation of AI development
• Massive investment in AI as national strategic infrastructure
• Continued and tightened export controls on chips and models bound for China
• Acceleration of AI in military and national-security domains

This is distinctly different from the European model exemplified by the EU AI Act—risk-tiered, norm-centric—and now marks an explicit "development- and dominance-first" doctrine. The transatlantic divergence in AI regulation paradigms began in earnest in early 2025.

China, the United States, and the EU advance AI under three different sets of norms. The history of AI in the late 2020s can no longer be told without all three poles in frame.