Compute is sovereignty. Data centers are the factories of the intelligence age. A country that cannot build them at scale will not lead AI, medicine, defense, energy, robotics, or advanced manufacturing. It will simply become dependent on countries that can. China and Russia do not give activist coalitions, zoning boards, climate NGOs, or bureaucratic safety panels a veto over strategic infrastructure. Beijing will build the power, build the data centers, subsidize the stack, and deploy the systems. Moscow will use whatever it can get. Neither will pause because American progressives discovered a new permitting objection. So the danger is not only that government uses AI to censor and surveil. The danger is that government, captured by anti-growth ideology, prevents free societies from building AI at all... leaving domination to regimes with no civil liberties, no open debate, and no concern for “human dignity.” The guardians become the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers become the bottleneck. And the bottleneck becomes national decline. The real alignment test is whether America can align freedom, energy, compute, and innovation faster than authoritarian states align control, coercion, and industrial policy.