Investing.com - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cast the US-China artificial intelligence race in existential terms on Wednesday, asserting that American defeat would "negate all our other efforts" and that the US currently holds roughly a six-month lead over Beijing in AI compute capacity.

Speaking at the Charlotte City Club on September 2, a day after the G20 Finance Ministers' meeting wrapped in Asheville, Bessent projected that the US will control 80% of global computing power by 2028, up from approximately 60% in 2025, driven by the Trump administration's regulatory, tax and energy policies. "We are going to go up from about, call it, 60% in 2025. By 2028, the US will have 80 per cent of global computing power here, which is just extraordinary," he said in a fireside conversation with Larry Kudlow, as reported by IANS wire.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), the dominant supplier of AI training and inference chips underpinning US data-center buildout, is the most direct equity expression of that compute-capacity thesis. Nvidia's data-center segment, which generated approximately $39 billion in its most recent quarter, is the most direct financial measure of whether the 80% compute target is on track; investors will get their next formal read when the company reports its fiscal third-quarter earnings in November 2026. Nvidia does not publicly break out the share of data-center revenue derived from US hyperscalers specifically, limiting the precision of any single-metric anchor for the thesis; nonetheless, a policy environment that accelerates domestic data-center construction translates directly into accelerated GPU demand, reinforcing the revenue and margin trajectory that has made the stock a proxy for US AI supremacy.

Bessent named four industrial companies whose CEOs participated in the first-ever private-sector session embedded in a G20 Finance Ministers' meeting as proof that AI's productivity gains extend well beyond Silicon Valley: Medtronic (NYSE: MDT), Deere & Co. (NYSE: DE), 3M (NYSE: MMM) and Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY). "It was fascinating to see the ecosystems that are developing, the productivity, the higher level of precision manufacturing both across their supply chains and their customer bases," he told reporters at the G20 closing press conference, according to the Asheville Citizen-Times.

The framing matters for equity positioning. These are not early-stage AI adopters but established industrials and pharma companies that are embedding machine intelligence into manufacturing tolerances, drug development timelines and logistics networks. Bessent's implicit argument is that AI multiple expansion is no longer a tech-sector story — it is a cross-market earnings story.

The G20 gathering itself ended without a unanimous communiqué after China rejected the closing consensus, with disagreements centered on non-market economic practices and export-distortion policies. That breakdown sharpened the competitive subtext of Bessent's AI remarks: the US is not merely racing to build compute, it is doing so in an environment of deepening economic rivalry with Beijing. "We want to set the guardrails, create incentives, and then let our private sector build. And that is where a nation's wealth is created," Bessent said, per IANS wire.

Bessent also addressed the Helene recovery still visible across the Asheville region, underscoring the need for continued federal infrastructure assistance. FEMA has approved more than $7.5 billion in federal funding to North Carolina, including a recent additional $137 million tranche, though officials acknowledge that much of the money remains tied up in approval processes, according to the Carolina Journal.

On domestic market inclusion, Bessent championed Trump Accounts — the program that seeds $1,000 investment accounts for children born during Trump's second term. He noted that an estimated 38% of US families have no stock market exposure and argued the accounts give previously sidelined households "skin in the game." More than 7 million children are already enrolled. "American families, left on the sidelines of Wall Street for too long, will finally understand what a piece of the action feels like," he said in earlier remarks to the Financial Literacy and Education Commission, per Money.com. Corporate adoption is accelerating: Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) have both announced they will match the $1,000 federal seed contribution for eligible employees, according to Investing.com reporting.

Two near-term developments will test whether Bessent's AI and market-inclusion theses gain traction. The IRS is expected to issue additional guidance rounds on Trump Account employer contributions, clarifying how companies such as MDT, DE, MMM and LLY can structure matching programs, which could broaden corporate adoption and deepen retail equity participation. Separately, the Commerce Department and White House OSTP are planning a technology showcase in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that Bessent flagged as part of the US AI investment promotion effort; confirmation of that event's date would provide the next formal policy marker for investors tracking the administration's compute-dominance agenda.