On October 27, 2025, the Department of Energy quietly unveiled a $1 billion partnership with Advanced Micro Devices to build two supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Lux and Discovery — a move Washington pitched as essential for American scientific and military competitiveness. The deal was announced by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su, and it marks another large step in the federal government leaning into high-cost tech projects supposed to secure U.S. supremacy in AI and supercomputing.
Lux is slated to be deployed in early 2026 and will be powered by AMD’s MI355X GPUs alongside EPYC CPUs and advanced networking tech, while Discovery is a more ambitious follow-on that the companies say will arrive in 2028 with user operations in 2029 using MI430-series accelerators. The systems will be co-developed with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and will live at Oak Ridge, billed as an “AI Factory” for science, energy, and national security work.
Conservatives should applaud the objective: keeping the cutting edge of computing on American soil and using it to accelerate breakthroughs in fusion energy, drug discovery, and the management of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. If these machines truly protect our data and reduce reliance on foreign supply chains, that’s a win for national security and for the hardworking Americans whose jobs depend on technological leadership.
But not every government tech romance deserves a free pass. The $1 billion number is a combined public-private pot, and the mechanics of who pays what and who profits remain opaque; history teaches that big federal-industrial projects breed cost overruns and cozy backroom deals unless Congress demands transparency and audits. The companies will provide machines and capital while the DOE hosts the systems, which makes oversight essential to ensure taxpayers aren’t being used as a blank check for corporate expansion.
Context matters: this comes amid a feeding frenzy on AI compute where private giants are cutting huge chip deals, including reported multibillion arrangements between AMD and OpenAI earlier this month — deals that have raised legitimate questions about corporate influence, insider advantages, and who ultimately benefits from the nation’s rush to AI. The scale of private cash flowing into AI makes it all the more important for conservatives to push for safeguards that prevent politically connected firms from gaming the system.
So here’s the conservative bargain: we back secure, sovereign American infrastructure that protects our military edge and helps laboratories turn scientific promise into real cures and reliable energy. But we also demand accountability — clear cost breakdowns, competitive procurement, domestic manufacturing commitments, and hiring practices that put American workers first rather than outsourcing the benefits to foreign contractors or handing sweetheart terms to cronies.
If Lux and Discovery truly accelerate fusion, cure diseases, and protect our homeland as promised, then this will be a story patriots can celebrate for generations. Until then, citizens and their representatives must stay vigilant — cheer the outcomes, but never surrender oversight — because preserving American greatness means defending both our security and our taxpayers from the same Washington machine that too often forgets who it serves.
