The Biden administration has given an internal green light to a multi-billion dollar intelligence-community budget aimed at acquiring some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips, The New York Times reports. The classified request, still needing Congressional approval, amounts to roughly $9 billion.

Still congressional approval required

The proposal would fund infrastructure capable of hosting Nvidia’s forthcoming Blackwell-class processors — hardware that demands liquid-cooled, power-intensive data centers. According to the Times, the administration is also moving to redirect approximately $800 million in existing funds to speed up the acquisition of sensitive computing resources, signaling a clear operational sprint.

What Blackwell chips tell us about the security AI race

Blackwell-class chips are not widely available yet, and their thermal and energy requirements make them unsuitable for standard data centers. That the intelligence community is explicitly planning around them suggests a bet on unmatched training and inference capabilities for classified workloads. For the global chip supply chain, this means even tighter constraints on leading-edge hardware, as governments effectively become priority buyers.

Implications for Morocco

For Moroccan security planners and digital policymakers, Washington’s move reinforces a trend where AI compute access is a national-security variable. It will shape future export-control regimes, cloud-sovereignty requirements, and the delicate balance between commercial and strategic GPU allocation.

The story also carries a pragmatic warning for Moroccan startups and universities: state-level demand for high-performance AI chips is intensifying, making casual access to top-tier hardware increasingly improbable in the medium term. The most resilient answer could be to pursue:

  • Regional or continental high-performance computing partnerships.
  • Optimized inference pipelines that do not require bleeding-edge silicon.
  • Architecture-agnostic AI development that can shift between available hardware tiers.

What to watch next

  • Whether the U.S. Congress amends or reduces the requested amount.
  • If Morocco’s own intelligence or defense structures accelerate their digital infrastructure roadmaps as a result.
  • Potential new export restrictions targeting compute-hungry AI accelerators.

Based on original reporting by The New York Times published on May 22, 2026. View the full article here.