A.I. boom a challenge for homeland manufacturers
Published 4:59 am Sunday, March 1, 2026
A.I. data center spending in America has created a boom for overseas manufacturers, not so much for manufacturers here at home.
“Roughly three-quarters of the cost of an A.I. data center is for the computer gear and parts such as computer chips that go inside of it,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “America’s A.I. champions, including the computer chip pioneer Nvidia, manufacture many of their products in Asia – despite efforts by the Biden and Trump administrations to reduce U.S. dependence on essential chips made overseas.”
“The single biggest threat to the world economy, the single biggest point of single failure, is that 97% of the high-end chips are made in Taiwan,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month.
Forbes reported that modern, top-of-the-line A.I. servers, like those running NVIDIA GPUs are built from thousands of components manufactured overseas with final assembly concentrated in Mexico, Taiwan, China, and other countries in Greater Asia.
Reshoring alone will not overcome this.
The New York Times reported that Tesla’s factory in Shanghai produces far more cars per worker than its plant in California. This gap “reflects something unsettling about China’s broader edge in manufacturing: It has figured out how to organize production around large-scale deployment of automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The United States has not.” And, “other advanced economies in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere are responding with similar strategies.”
There’s more.
“America Needs A.I. That Can Do Math – Language skills won’t be enough to stay ahead of China in the economic sectors that matter,” headlined a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. will need to use a whole new class of artificial-intelligence models – built for the world of science and math, not language and images – to stay competitive with China as it puts the pedal to the metal in critical sectors.”
Interestingly, a Mississippi-based company seeks to help solve this issue. Brient Mayfield, CEO and founder of Optimal Answers based in Gulfport, notes that A.I. models often hallucinate, providing wrong answers at a 30% error rate. “To be clear,” he said, “A.I. is amazing and is gaining adoption for performing work where 100% accuracy is not required. Such uses include natural language processing, image management, and search (with data distillation).” In contrast, he continued, “accuracy and reliability are required for workflow automation and most decision support needs.”
Optimal Answers has now adapted its Optimal Decision Optimization product to incorporate A.I. “By combining optimization and AI, the strengths of both technologies can be leveraged in the decision support computations while minimizing the weaknesses,” Mayfield said.
As America integrates A.I. into autonomous weapons systems, accuracy must be optimized.
Crawford is an author and syndicated columnist from North Jackson.
