Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI

Summation with Auren Hoffman

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Summation with Auren Hoffman
Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI
Aug 18, 2026

Cory Gardner is a former U.S. Senator and Congressman from Colorado and was one of the Senate's leading Taiwan and China experts, chairing the Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia and authoring the Taipei Act. He is now president and CEO of NCTA, the Internet & Television Association, whose members built the nation's largest broadband platform.

In this episode of Summation, Cory and Auren discuss:

  • Why the AI race gets won on spectrum, fiber, and memory chips
  • The bottleneck raising the price of your iPhone, PlayStation, and router
  • Why an open society is vulnerable to a campaign to turn Americans against AI
  • What a China expert thinks about our dependence on chips made off China's coast

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Cory Gardner on X at @CoryGardner

Episode Artwork Fmr. Senator Cory Gardner: why the AI race is won on boring infrastructure and how China wins by making America hate AI 53:33 Episode Artwork CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill on software's new bottleneck and zero to $50m ARR in 2 years 55:22 Episode Artwork Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games 1:05:01 Episode Artwork OpenAI Chief Economist Ronnie Chatterji: measuring the greatest technology of our time 56:31 Episode Artwork Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg: why AI wins a Nobel before a Pulitzer 1:06:33 Episode Artwork Fifth Wall CEO Brendan Wallace: the data center land grab and the most stable asset on earth you still can't buy 53:10 Episode Artwork Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco on drone swarms, AI for warfighters, and the end of air superiority 1:00:04 Episode Artwork Short-seller Carson Block: a fugitive CEO, Libyan spies, and $50B fraud 1:10:47 Episode Artwork Facet CEO Anders Jones on the biggest heist in finance, how advisors really sell permission, and the great boomer wealth transfer 49:36 Episode Artwork Charles Duhigg on the writing AI can't touch, what GLP-1s really do to your brain, and the serendipity tax 1:03:42 Episode Artwork SignalFire CEO Chris Farmer on why venture funds now last 20 years and the hiring boom behind the layoffs 46:03 Episode Artwork GTMnow Podcast | Your First VC Meeting Will Be Agent-to-Agent 39:59 Episode Artwork Serval CEO Jake Stauch: talent is the only moat left, hiring founders as FDEs, and building a $1B company with your wife and a newborn 50:10 Episode Artwork Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko on why curiosity is AI’s scarcest resource 1:00:06 Episode Artwork Fundrise CEO Ben Miller: VCX, Roaring Kitty's revenge, and AI killing the office 1:02:03 Episode Artwork Six-time CIA Station Chief Ralph Goff on the new doctrine of war 1:05:23 Episode Artwork Glenn Youngkin on governing like a CEO, the AI power crisis, and why every operator should run for office​ 57:44 Episode Artwork Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta on why trades are AI-proof, the trillion-dollar home services market, and why software stopped being a capital asset 58:53 Episode Artwork Eric Ries on why "bad governance" outperforms, the case against shareholder primacy, and AI's Chernobyl moment 58:46 Episode Artwork Fmr. German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on NATO, nuclear energy, and how to disagree without blood 1:01:18 Episode Artwork Fmr Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on chips, China, and lessons from Andy Grove 58:10 Episode Artwork Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim on mathematical superintelligence, why math is harder than code for LLMs, and the end of buggy software 48:54 Episode Artwork Retired 4-star General John Allen on Iran, AI hyperwar, and Taiwan’s future 55:19 Episode Artwork Adrian Aoun on healthcare as a product, Apple's AI problem, and why you should have kids now 53:57 Episode Artwork Tod Sacerdoti (Flex GP and Pipedream CEO) on seed at scale and SaaS mispricing 1:02:20