Anthropic executive Tom Brown urged G20 nations on 2 September to fast-track data centre construction, warning that shortages of power and construction labour have become the single biggest bottleneck slowing the global expansion of artificial intelligence. Brown made the remarks at a fireside conversation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, alongside US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The Core Argument: Data Centres as Critical Infrastructure

Brown described the current AI-driven infrastructure build-out as unprecedented in scale — larger, he argued, than the railway boom of the 19th century. 'We have this incredible industrial build out of likes of which we've never seen in the history of humanity more than the railroads of the 1800s,' he said. He added that any country willing to enable construction could participate in the resulting economic gains.

When Lutnick asked what infrastructure nations needed to capture AI's economic benefits, Brown was direct: 'I think that the biggest thing by far is building more, making it possible to build more data centres, more compute in your countries. It's very clearly the bottleneck for all of our progress. We're in a huge shortage of the power and labour needed to support the demand for AI.'

What Governments Need to Do

Brown identified two primary prerequisites for data centre development: land-use permits and adequate construction labour. 'The biggest things that we need in order to build data centres are we need permitting for land to be able to build there,' he said, adding that sourcing sufficient skilled construction workers was the second critical challenge.

Lutnick reinforced the message, encouraging governments to position themselves as attractive destinations for technology investment. 'If your country rolls out the red carpet to great investment, they're more likely to have that investment than if it's a fight to get in,' the Commerce Secretary said. Brown noted that data centres could also feed electricity back into national grids, offering an additional infrastructure dividend.

The Economic Case: Reindustrialisation and AI Labour

Brown outlined two broad economic gains from frontier AI. The first is reindustrialisation — large-scale physical investment in compute infrastructure. The second is an effective expansion of the intellectual workforce. 'The key component of the overall economy is how many smart people do we have doing good work?' he said, adding that AI models were increasingly performing intellectual labour in software engineering, mathematics, and scientific research.

He predicted that AI could dramatically accelerate medical research, including oncology. 'I think there's no doubt that if we have, like, a million times more oncology researchers, we could make progress that's not just, like, 10 per cent faster. It would be, like, multiples faster,' he said.

AI Industry Growth: The Numbers

Brown cited striking growth metrics for the frontier AI sector. The economic value created by leading AI laboratories is reportedly growing fourfold annually — equivalent to a doubling every six months. 'There's never been an industry of this size that's been growing at that speed,' he said. He also noted that the cost of accessing a model comparable to the leading model of a year earlier had fallen by roughly 20 times in that period.

Brown argued that governments and businesses would extract greater value from AI by treating models as collaborators — providing them with documents, tools, and permissions to complete assigned tasks. He also flagged a global commercial opportunity for companies that can adapt general-purpose models to specialised domains such as law, biology, and mechanical engineering.

India and the Global Context

This comes amid a broader global scramble for compute capacity. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, develops the Claude family of AI models and has emphasised safety and responsible deployment. Governments including India are actively seeking greater computing infrastructure while grappling with questions around energy supply, land use, water consumption, and the specialised skills needed to build and operate large-scale data centres. Brown's remarks at the G20-adjacent forum are likely to sharpen policy conversations in New Delhi and other capitals about whether permitting and power policy can be streamlined to attract AI investment.