Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently pitched giving engineers “AI tokens” in addition to their base salary. ″[Engineers] are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay,” Huang said at the chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference. “I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens … because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive,” said Huang. Similar comments have also been made by top executives of Microsoft and Salesforce. For those unaware, Tokens are units of data processed by AI models that can be spent to run tools and automate tasks.
As the use of AI has skyrocketed during the war in Iran, talk of AI tokens has reached the Pentagon as well.
While discussing the role of AI during the Iran war, US Army secretary Dan Driscoll said, “The amount of tokens the United States Army is using right now on these AI platforms has gone up by 8x in the last couple of weeks. ” Driscoll made the statement while talking about the military’s growing need for data centres as AI plays a greater role in modern warfare.
US Army picks Carlyle and KKR to build data centres at Military bases
According to a report in the Financial Times, the US Army has selected private equity giants Carlyle and KKR to develop two massive data centers on military bases. The project is estimated to cost $4 billion in total, which is $2 billion each. This strategic move aligns with the Trump administration’s broader objective to integrate the $13 trillion private capital industry into national defense infrastructure. Under the proposed arrangement, the Army will grant long-term land leases to the companies, which will be solely responsible for the construction and operation of the facilities, sparing the military from direct capital investment.
While the plans for these centers actually predate the current war, Driscoll emphasized that the computational power they provide is essential for modern battlefield demands, such as neutralizing drone swarms and managing complex missile threats. He noted that the specific infrastructure at Fort Bliss and Dugway Proving Ground is vital for maintaining a competitive edge in any potential future conflict with China. Driscoll expressed a goal of establishing dedicated computing capacity within the Indo-Pacific region by the end of the current presidential term, ensuring that advanced AI resources are available to soldiers even in highly contested environments abroad.
The Pentagon is “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” in the war on Iran to help “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds,” said Admiral Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, in a video shared on social media platform X recently. He said that the AI tools allow military leadership to “cut through the noise” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.”
At the heart of the Pentagon’s shift to AI-animated warfare is Palantir’s Maven Smart System and its integrated use of Claude, the AI platform from software company Anthropic.
