The Trump administration has launched a consortium with major investment funds and allies to shore up energy and critical minerals and compete with China, while working to stay in front of potential supply chain vulnerabilities that could curb its artificial intelligence build-out.
The unfolding war in the Middle East and curtailment of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate how “single points of failure can be incredibly disruptive to markets” and demonstrate a need for a long-term strategy to de-risk those potential weak spots, Jacob Helberg, under secretary of state for economic affairs at the State Department, said during a panel at the Hill and Valley Forum on Tuesday.
The administration, he said, is launching a consortium with Mubadala Investment, an Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund; Temasek, a Singaporean investment fund; and SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate and investment holding company focused on AI and technology.
The group will focus on bolstering investment in projects like tech, mineral processing projects, and infrastructure like railroads and highways, and deploying a “pro-innovation agenda on AI.”
“This will be a group that is actually going to be a great mechanism to coordinate with some of the institutional investors that have incredible expertise” to deploy and allocate capital in ways that are commercially viable and strategic, said Helberg, who was previously an adviser to the Council of Economic Advisers at the White House.
Helberg emphasized that the effort, focused on competing with China, will build on the so-called Pax Silica initiative, an effort the administration launched last year aimed at building secure supply chains for technologies central to AI. He also said he will host a U.S.-United Arab Emirates working group focused on AI this week.
The New York Times, which first reported the consortium, quoted Helberg as stating the initiative is voluntary; aims to raise $1 trillion; and will include countries like Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Sweden, in addition to the U.S., which will contribute $250 million toward the investment.
“We have actually approached Pax Silica in a way that has minimal bureaucracy,” Helberg said at the event on Tuesday, adding that the group meets to “get things done.”
“When we have things done, we talk about them and celebrate them, but it is entirely around outcomes and projects, not around governance to create yet another grouping that becomes a bureaucracy unto itself,” he said.
The fund is part of the Trump administration’s multiprong effort to shore up mineral supply chains that Beijing controls. The White House has also launched a $12 billion mineral stockpile, Project Vault, and called on U.S. allies and partners to join a new trading bloc that will use price floors.
Trump officials and Republicans at the event on Tuesday reiterated calls for Congress to codify a White House directive on AI.
“We have a big challenge ahead of us, we have to find a way to create a bipartisan piece of legislation that can pass both houses of Congress and get to the president’s desk,” said Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
At the same forum, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) implored audience members to build in the United States.
“We’ve seen what can happen when we hinder America’s ability to build at home, when we cede rare earth processing, and we build supply chains dependent on adversarial nations,” he said. “So all we’re asking is a very simple, simple request: build here.”
