You are right it won't work, but a race with China is in the imaginations of politicians taken in by AI CEOs scaremongering. The Chinese are probably willing to stand by and watch the US overbuild AI data centers.
nah, it is a race; nation-states are in the midst of a big upheaval. Nobody is going to give up a possible advantage.
It's the 1960s missile gap in the 21st century, and the only people who aren't susceptible are the Russians because they can't afford table stakes. The Chinese have 47 humanoid robot companies and they need fewer than one. They have apartments for half again as many people as can urbanize, and that's a mania we should have mirrored. Our dead malls aren't big enough to convert into data centers so we have to build Brobdingnagian metal sheds so that we're not caught short in the GPU gap. Feh.