The White House has drawn a stark historical parallel between the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the current era of artificial intelligence, framing the rise of AI as the catalyst for a potential "Second Great Divergence" in global economic power. This assessment, presented in a paper by the Council of Economic Advisers titled "Artificial Intelligence and the Great Divergence," positions AI at the core of US economic strategy, arguing that the speed and scale of AI adoption will determine which nations and companies achieve multi-generational dominance, much like steam power and coal did two centuries ago. The report explicitly advocates for accelerated innovation, massive infrastructure development, and sweeping deregulation to secure American AI supremacy.[1][2][3]

The central theme of the White House paper is the unprecedented speed of the current technological shift compared to the relatively slow accumulation of change that defined the original Industrial Revolution. That historical period, which took generations to fully manifest, saw industrializing nations pull away from the rest of the world. In contrast, the AI revolution is argued to be compressing decades into months, with key metrics like investment, performance, and adoption rates demonstrating a breakneck pace of change measurable in real-time.[4][5][3] The exponential growth in computing power for AI training, which has increased roughly fourfold annually since 2010, resulting in a billionfold increase since 2012, is cited as a prime example of this accelerated timeline.[5][6] This speed means that the economic divergence is not a distant prediction but an ongoing process, forcing organizations to quickly decide whether to position themselves to benefit from AI's productivity gains or risk being disrupted.[4]

For the technology industry, the report's comparison validates the massive-scale, compute-first approach currently dominating the AI landscape. The White House analysis highlights that AI-related investment is already having a measurable impact on national economic output, with one analysis claiming that investment in the first half of a recent year added 1.3 percentage points to US GDP growth, a contribution likened to the historical impact of railroad investment during the Industrial Revolution.[5][7] This economic policy view emphasizes the necessity of large-scale physical infrastructure, which the administration has prioritized through initiatives that treat data centers as national security assets. Such measures, including the "Stargate" mega-project, a massive network of advanced AI data centers, are designed to ensure the U.S. controls the fundamental utilities of the next economy: massive compute and energy capacity.[2][3] The concentration of AI capabilities is already striking, with the U.S. controlling roughly three-quarters of global GPU cluster performance for AI training, and cumulative private AI investment in the U.S. exceeding $470 billion over a recent decade, nearly ten times that of Europe.[5][4] This data underscores the policy’s implicit goal: to ensure the U.S. remains the sole gatekeeper of advanced Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capabilities.[2]

The historical analogy also serves as a warning about the potential for widening inequality, both domestically and globally. The original Great Divergence created a profound gap between industrializing and non-industrializing nations, and the White House paper suggests AI could precipitate a second, faster split between AI "leaders" and "laggards."[8][4] The report notes that AI's economic benefits, particularly in productivity and high-value sectors, are likely to accrue unevenly due to the concentration of semiconductor manufacturing, cloud infrastructure, and frontier model development in advanced economies and multinational firms.[9] Labor market effects are identified as a second axis of divergence, where high-skill workers in technical and managerial roles are expected to gain from productivity enhancements, while middle-skill, routine occupations face significant displacement pressures.[9] This risk of a "winner-take-most" global system is a clear parallel to the societal upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, where widespread job displacement and wealth concentration were defining characteristics. The policy focus on speed and dominance, achieved partly through deregulation and infrastructure prioritization, has been interpreted by some critics as treating domestic and global "divergence" as a necessary side effect of maintaining U.S. technological supremacy against rivals like China.[2]

Despite the economic risks, the administration's strategic framing is an unapologetic pursuit of technological hegemony, viewing the AI race as a zero-sum competition for national security. The report emphasizes that AI’s transformative potential covers an industrial revolution—enabling new materials, drugs, and manufacturing—an information revolution in media and communication, and a renaissance of new intellectual and scientific achievements.[10] For the AI industry, this governmental stance signals sustained and aggressive public-private investment, particularly in compute infrastructure, and a continued emphasis on a deregulatory environment designed to favor rapid scaling over safety-centric frameworks. The implication for companies is a directive to move beyond AI experimentation—a stage where 78 percent of organizations currently operate—to full production integration, as only about 10 percent of firms have currently integrated AI into actual goods and services.[4][5] The core message from the White House, therefore, is that AI is not just another utility, but the new foundation of global economic power, and the nation that mobilizes capital, infrastructure, and policy most rapidly will inherit a vastly disproportionate share of the coming prosperity.[2][3]