Publications: Daniel Castro

Data centers can deliver substantial tax revenue, jobs, infrastructure investment, and lower utility costs when communities adopt policies that capture their benefits while managing local impacts.

The United States will not realize the full benefits of AI if policymakers treat it primarily as a technology that needs to be constrained.

Building factories is not the same as achieving lasting industrial strength. Korea should design its “Three Megaprojects” as reference factories that give suppliers the testing, qualification, and commercial track records needed to win customers around the world.

Korea should use its AI-memory windfall to finance the shared capabilities, research infrastructure, and commercialization pathways needed to create the next boom. The Future Response Fund should address enduring commercialization gaps, not create permanent spending commitments.

Congress has an opportunity to strengthen consumer protection while preserving the benefits of digital commerce. No marketplace can eliminate every counterfeit product or fraudulent seller. But every marketplace serving American consumers should meet reasonable expectations for seller accountability, transparency, and effective action against harmful conduct.

Korean and industry reports suggest China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is moving faster in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips than many in Seoul expected. Korea still leads. But the margin is narrowing, and that should change how Seoul thinks about its AI goals.

The right goal for Korea is not an AI tax, but an AI diffusion strategy paired with sound tax reform. The government should help firms adopt AI, help workers transition, and make sure productivity gains are broadly shared, without making the use of AI itself more expensive.

As Daniel Castro writes in Tech Policy Press, U.S. export controls were intended to preserve America’s AI lead, but by accelerating China’s push for technological self-sufficiency and strengthening competing AI ecosystems, they may be undermining that goal.

As new technologies such as AI expand both user-directed and provider-driven personalization capabilities in digital systems, policymakers should ensure that personalization strengthens transparency, accountability, and user control rather than constrain its development.

In focusing so heavily on the dangers of AI, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas understates the degree to which these technologies can expand human capability, improve quality of life, and promote human flourishing, while largely overlooking the need for policies to support widespread AI adoption and diffusion.