Pax Silica: Inside the Trump Administration’s Tech Strategy with Jacob Helberg

The General Purpose are joined by Jacob Helberg, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. We spoke with Jacob before he was confirmed in this role and we're very excited to have him back to discuss Pax Silica, which is a multi-nation effort to secure the AI supply chain for the United States and its allies.

We're not going to do government-operated supply chains because that's not how we shine as a country. Our superpower is really our private sector and our companies. There's the old Steve Jobs quote that American products enchant and delight users around the world by the billions. That really is our edge as a country. And so the answer has been to try to work in lockstep with our private companies and our builders to build platforms that are commercially viable and that can ultimately live outside of the government as a private service.

Jacob, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's get right into it. Three months ago, you announced Pax Silica, a super-ambitious coalition. Can you explain what it is and where you are in it?

Absolutely. I gave a speech at the Hudson Institute that was really meant to be our blueprint for Pax Silica. Pax Silica is an economic security coalition that now has 14 countries, and the idea is really to have an ecosystem-based approach to our supply chains, and specifically to the AI supply chain.

In my speech at Hudson, I outlined our different lines of effort, including our policy road maps and our projects. About a week and a half ago, we did the first big—what would be the tech equivalent of a product rollout—where we announced a forward-deployed industrial base with our oldest ally in Asia, the Philippines.

We made this arrangement with them where they are granting us 4,000 acres, which is obviously very substantial. It's a third of the size of Manhattan to do a very large industrial build-out. It's one of a kind and helps combine the predictability and certainty of the American common-law system with the industrial comparative advantages that the Philippines offers. The goal is really to secure inputs that are vital for our supply chains. We're super excited to be here in San Francisco, talk to builders, and see ways that we can actually accelerate supply-chain security for our tech companies.

Is this set up as a special economic zone in the Philippines, or could you tell us more about the details beyond the legal side that you mentioned?

Absolutely. Right now, there are 2 phases to the plan. The first phase is the State Department taking the zone into custody. We are referring to it as an economic security zone because it is a very unique type of arrangement.

The State Department has the authority to take land and property into custody, sort of how foreign governments gift the State Department counselors, consulates, and embassies. It's very unique to do a gift of 4,000 acres, but fortunately there are no statutory limits on how big or small property can be. That's phase 1. Right now, it's actually diplomatic property that is effectively governed by the same laws as our embassies are.

Phase 2 will be the long-term development and build-out of the land. We have a 2-year window to negotiate the details with our Filipino counterparts on the investor protections that will apply to the land, the taxation regimes, and all of the different legal safeguards that investors will be able to benefit from in the long term. Our goal is, within that 2-year window, to have a long-term framework that will be multidecade.

It's an amazing innovation. Are there specific domains that you think make sense to invest in there, from a manufacturing, mineral processing, or whatever-it-is perspective?

The goal is really to test a concept that could potentially be replicable. Right now, when we think about the AI supply chain, a lot of people just think of chips. But the reality is that the AI supply chain actually includes thousands of inputs, like precision reducers, server motors, rare-earth magnets, and actuators. Our concentration risk as a country is incredibly high for basically all of those inputs.

The goal is to identify key geographies that have industrial strengths and bring unique capabilities to the table that could actually help us move the needle meaningfully in different segments of the supply chain. The Philippines already has an indigenous manufacturing ecosystem that's already quite deep. It's our oldest ally in Asia, so we have a very deep values alignment with the Philippines. We think that the nexus between that values alignment and their industrial advantages actually makes for a very compelling value proposition for a lot of companies.

We're talking with a number of companies focused on the robotics supply chain. As you guys know, living out here, I'm sure you include robotics companies in your portfolio. Robotics is an incredibly promising industry that really is poised to change a lot of things in manufacturing as well as in people's daily lives, and the robotics supply chain is right now completely dominated by China. That's an area where we're particularly interested in potentially making a bet.

When most people hear “economic security policy,” one of the first things they think of is the Belt and Road Initiative. How would you contrast your strategy and the State Department's strategy here with that approach?

That's such a great question. I think one of the benefits we've been able to leverage in developing the strategy today is the ability to study 25 years of China's Belt and Road Initiative—how they've done what they've done, what's worked, and what hasn't worked.

Do you want to explain what that is, too, for our audience?

The Belt and Road Initiative is a very large foreign-policy project of the Chinese government that basically involved using state-owned enterprises that are essentially extensions of the government to carry out massive infrastructure projects overseas. The idea is using infrastructure projects as a tool of foreign policy to achieve foreign-policy outcomes.

Was it the big build-outs, for example, in Africa?

Exactly. They did it in a variety of countries there. That's right. So whether it was creating mines or processing facilities, a lot of the time it involved building out very big roads. Sometimes that meant bridges, and a lot of the time it included railways.

Fundamentally, it was state-owned enterprises building government-operated railways and government-built roads and bridges. The Chinese government, by virtue of its system, really built all of this in-house. For us, when we think about how we should secure supply chains, we need to make a lot of investments that touch upon these kinds of industrial capabilities. But as Americans, we're not going to do this in-house, inside of the government.

The effect of this for China was basically both building out their industrial base and securing natural resources in some of these countries.

Exactly. They were able to build a network that ensured that their factories in China had all the inputs in order to really thrive. Shenzhen today is really the world's factory floor because they have deep relationships with suppliers and vendors on every continent, basically. The infrastructure that they leverage allows them to get access in a way that's very, very competitive.

So the question for us is: How do we compete in that landscape at a time when we want to reindustrialize? The answer is that we're not going to do government-operated supply chains because that's not how we shine as a country. I think where we've landed is that our superpower is really our private sector and our companies.

It's sort of the old Steve Jobs quote that American products enchant and delight users around the world by the billions, and that really is our edge as a country. How do we adopt a product-based, product-centric approach to our foreign policy, where we can actually use that kind of approach to achieve foreign-policy outcomes?

That's very much the lens of how we've decided to focus our economic-security strategy. The answer has been to try to work in lockstep with our private companies and our builders to build platforms that are commercially viable and that can ultimately live outside of the government as a private service.

The forward-deployed industrial base is meant to be a platform for private investment that will be viable for the long term. It's the first of its kind. We're thinking about making a big play in the logistics space in partnership with large corporates, and in June we're looking at potentially doing a broader rollout where we're going to roll out 4 or 5 different big lines of effort. You guys are both invited to Washington for it.

Having a product-based approach is very much how we're thinking about it.

As somebody who's done a deep study of the pros and cons of the Belt and Road, there's obviously access to infrastructure and inputs as some dimension of success here.

What's been the failure point for Belt and Road?

Well, first of all, some of the projects have been useful for China. There's a lot of waste in the Belt and Road Initiative, mainly because whenever you have central planning and government bureaucrats effectively allocating large pools of capital, there's a lot of waste because vendors massively overcharge. There's also a lot of waste because there are a lot of roads to nowhere.

What happens is China will basically deploy capital to its own companies, which then write IOUs to the host country. These projects have gained a reputation for being a debt trap because China will say, "We'll build a road as a loan," except the company building the road is Chinese, so China can decide what the price is. As you guys know, when you build a house or do any construction project, a lot of projects run over budget.

When a host country thinks it's taking on X million dollars in liabilities and it actually ends up being 10X, that's when they end up in quicksand. The Belt and Road Initiative has really garnered a reputation for being a tool of political leverage that a lot of countries are still digging themselves out of. It's versus one of partnership.

Exactly, versus one where it's positive-sum. I think a lot of countries don't feel like they have enough upside in it. It's Chinese workers, Chinese companies, and a lot of the time, it's Chinese equity because the debt converts to equity if the host country defaults. They do, a lot of the time.

We're approaching it totally differently. Because we're approaching it by putting our companies in the driver's seat, it's actually, in a lot of ways, much more ethical, because the deal is structured in a way that's really meant to be a true joint venture and one that will be optimized for commercial viability, not just for political purposes.

When you think about the 14 countries that are already part of Pax Silica, or this as a potential blueprint for others to be involved in American forward-deployed industrial bases, what's the value proposition for them?

The value proposition is that one of the amazing things we're seeing is that the AI revolution is leading to huge growth. Despite the volatility in the energy markets, the American economy has proven incredibly resilient. A big part of that is AI being an incredibly strong economic force that is already fueling over a third of our economic GDP growth right here in the US.

Overseas, we're seeing that growth translate to record demand for copper, record demand for cobalt, record demand for lots of different inputs that go into data centers, and record demand for electricians and all the rest. The takeaway for a lot of these countries is that if they find ways of having a bigger part and a bigger stake in that supply chain at different layers that make sense for their companies and their economy, they can derive a lot of economic growth from that revolution.

The amazing thing about the tech industry, especially when we go through these inflection points, as you guys know, is that the pie grows really fast. It's not zero-sum, which makes it incredibly conducive to forging mutually beneficial partnerships, because we're not approaching it as what I gain, someone else loses. Because the pie is growing, we're partnering together.

This is very much part of the ethos of how we're partnering with the Philippines. We're developing a partnership where we both have skin in the game and we both share in the upside of success. Risk is evenly allocated, and so is upside. Ultimately, it's very much a win-win proposition.

How do you think about the areas where you want to partner with other countries versus having things happen in the US? I know, for example, there's been a long-standing effort to bring back fabs and the ability to manufacture semiconductors at state-of-the-art line widths and everything else in the US. That hasn't quite happened yet, although there are active efforts to do that. What do you think is important to do in the US itself versus partner with other countries, and how do you figure out what goes where?

Yeah, that is such a great question. I think I would answer that question in a few different parts. The first part is maybe starting with some stats. America accounts for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% to 30% of global consumption in any given quarter. It's obviously huge because we're 4% of the world's population, but we're basically a fourth to a third of the world's total consumption.

Or other things like that?

Other things than Celsius or no-name companies. We consume a lot of stuff. Americans like to consume. We're a risk-taking culture and a high-consumption society. Our production levels are not 20% or 30%; we produce a lot less than that.

Part of what we're seeing is that if we narrow the gap between what we consume and what we produce, we will reindustrialize America. That will be a massive reindustrialization plan that will inevitably include a lot of semi-autonomy or full autonomy. If we industrialize an economy where unemployment is already at 4%, it will have to be very, very autonomous, which is possible. Singapore has proven that that's possible. They have highly autonomous ports and factories.

Then there's the question of what happens with the other 70% of the world's consumption that is currently mostly concentrated in China. The idea is that if we want to have a supply chain system where America and its allies in the global economy have access to suppliers that are more evenly distributed, reliable, trustworthy, and transparent, I think a lot of countries see that as a business opportunity for them to have more production in their respective regions.

Part of the idea for the forward-deployed industrial base and these economic security zones is to have a hub-based approach where we can leverage the industrial attributes. For example, if regions have a lot of rare-earth minerals or, in the case of the Philippines, a very deep indigenous manufacturing ecosystem—things that they're really good at or have unique advantages in—we can leverage that to help capitalize on it and make sure they can contribute to the supply chains for areas where they're really good.

Ultimately, we can help foster regional hubs because the population of Africa is growing massively. South America is also growing very quickly, in places like Brazil and Argentina. I think having a hub-based approach is very promising.

America remains the economic engine of the global economy. The parts that we reindustrialize here will definitely be the biggest driving forces. You're totally right: the effort to bring back semiconductor fab production here is already well underway. That will continue. It's already in flight, and there's a whole host of reasons why it wouldn't necessarily make sense to try to replicate that elsewhere, because it's highly technical. The global supply of talent available in that area is very finite and limited, and it's also extremely capital-intensive. It wouldn't make sense to replicate that elsewhere before it's finished here.

The unfortunate and good news is that the supply chain is vast, and there are a lot of things that still need to be built. The world is really, really ripe with opportunity in that sense.

How do you think about other inputs into what you're talking about? For example, you mentioned rare-earth magnets. My sense—and I haven't verified this, so please correct me if it's wrong—is that, A, rare earths are not actually rare; B, the total market size is in the few billion dollars a year; and C, that market is heavily subsidized by China in order to control supply. It's sort of a lever from a political standpoint. Are there considerations around other mechanisms that the government can use? I know there have been, but I'd love to hear how you all are thinking about other aspects of the supply chain that may be raw materials, that may be heavily subsidized or propped up by foreign governments, and how we should address those areas in addition.

Absolutely. You're exactly right. The really interesting thing about rare earths is that, as you point out, they're not that rare. I think some people have said that they're everywhere. It's not totally true either. They're not everywhere, but they're in lots of different places.

I think the key thing that really drives the economics of those industries is how much energy you need to pump into the ground in order to extract a given mineral at a given quality grade. What’s actually really rare is the refining process, because the number of processing facilities for these minerals is very, very limited outside of China. They exist, but in very limited quantities. And you’re right: China obviously subsidizes the hell out of them.

It’s very exciting to share with you that the Trump administration has actually had a very comprehensive approach. We’ve been really focused on the mineral security issue pretty much since day 1 of the administration. We did the largest critical-minerals summit in the history of the State Department on February 4, with over 55 countries participating, and we signed critical-minerals MOU deals with dozens of countries that have lots of different kinds of minerals. Now, one of the things that we’re doing, and that has been aggressively pursued across the administration, is allocating capital and investments into a lot of these projects to make sure that they have access to the resources to expand production.

So, that’s on the supply side. On the demand side, the administration is hard at work negotiating deals with countries to address the pricing issue. Because, as you guys know from the businesses that you invest in, you can invest a lot of money in a startup, but ultimately, a lot of the economics of whether a company can be viable is really based on the price that the company is able to provide a service for. The pricing mechanism is really, really central to unlocking long-term commercial viability. And I’m incredibly confident that we will resolve the pricing issue for the minerals market before the end of this administration.

You mentioned that you are directly investing in domains of importance where you’re trying to trigger better supply capability with the U.S. and its allies. How do you think about the role of—asking for a friend—private capital in these initiatives?

I think you guys have such an important role to play, mainly because—

[Laughter.]

There’s a lot of whether a project materializes or not, as you guys know, that hinges on execution capacity. Can a company really execute on a very aggressive, ambitious plan? One of the amazing superpowers of the venture-capital business is that you guys are hardwired to assess a lot of the personality attributes of founders and operators, to tell you some of the things that are harder to read from a deck or spreadsheet: Does this person really have what it takes to execute and address execution risk, underlying scientific risk, and all the different risks that inevitably exist in any company?

We would really love for the venture-capital ecosystem to help be part of the solution, because I think you guys are better positioned to assess who the best players in the space are. We can take that as an important signal to help inform the capital allocations that we make on the government side, to make sure that we allocate money in the right places and in the most efficient way possible, especially as good stewards of taxpayer money.

The other thing, beyond assessing who the best players are, is the innovation side. There are a number of really great companies, especially out here in the Bay Area, that are working on new materials, rare-earth-free magnets, and lots of other kinds of innovations. I think there’s a lot of room and potential for coming up with a rabbit-out-of-a-hat situation, where we somehow end up solving this issue in a way that was completely unanticipated through innovation. That will ultimately be a solution born out of the tech industry, not the government. Those are things that we obviously want to be attuned to and help support in any way we can.

You mentioned limited bandwidth, of course, and economic security in the AI supply chain being an enormous topic. How do you think about prioritizing 2027 and 2028 versus 5 years out? This is something we think about as well. If you look at next-generation lithography and robotics and, let’s say, chip and new semiconductor designs, for example, there are some longer-term plays that are more capital-intensive. So, we balance our views on that, and nuclear and such, with software that’s going to ship this year.

One of the approaches that the administration has taken, which hopefully will really be the foundation for a lot of short-term change as well as provide long-term support, is helping shape the environment—creating a macro environment that makes innovation, iteration on innovations, and deployment of innovations a lot easier and less expensive.

The administration’s approach to expanding our domestic energy supply is obviously part of that, as is expanding nuclear energy. The administration has undertaken a lot of efforts to cut red tape and accelerate the deployment of American nuclear energy. From memory, it was actually one of the first executive orders the president signed, in which they said that they wanted to quadruple our domestic nuclear supply, as well as take a lot of actions to deregulate. The One Big Beautiful Bill included a lot of tax incentives.

Through the State Department, we’re looking to play a constructive part in shaping that environment by creating these evergreen systems—basically, like the forward-deployed industrial base—that will be a long-term platform, and hopefully a replicable one that we could pursue in other geographies. The idea is that, for the long term, our technology companies will have these platforms to operate in, which will provide a competitive strategic edge that they can use to build very, very quickly and actually get to market faster.

How do you think about transitioning through administrations in general? You mentioned a number of executive orders. Typically, when an administration shifts, you end up with a lot of those executive orders undone in both directions, right? Somebody comes in and cancels a bunch of executive orders that were passed or signed by the prior administration, and they write a bunch of other ones that may be at odds with them. Often, the key is legislation or other approaches. How do you view making this stick if you think it’s so important for our country’s future?

Well, there are some things that I think will be hard to undo. Tax reform is very sticky. One of the interesting attributes about my role at the State Department is that we’re actually not allowed to comment on electoral politics.

Yeah. So, it’s kind of an interesting situation. Now, I guess, ignoring the statutory limitation that we’re subject to, we have an audience of a lot of folks in the AI ecosystem, but also a lot of folks in the general business and investing ecosystem, with companies of different scales. What do you think American businesspeople and entrepreneurs should know about these policies in terms of how they affect them?

With Pax Silica, we want to use it as a platform to expand market access for our companies, because even among our allies, sometimes our companies face a lot of hurdles with exporting their products and services. We want to hear feedback from them on what’s working and what’s not working in places like Japan, South Korea, and India, and things that we could do better in the policymaking space to make sure that we can provide some support for our companies to be more competitive in those markets.

We also want to hear from them. It’s been great to already get a lot of feedback from a number of different companies on partnerships that are already in flight and opportunities that they see on the table on the supply-chain-security side. There’s a lot of cross-pollination and partnerships already being forged between American companies and companies in India, Japan, South Korea, and even Singapore. Understanding those partnerships helps us understand how executives are thinking about their supply-chain strategy.

Everyone, uniformly, is obviously thinking about ways of being much more deliberate about their supply-chain decisions, in ways that factor in the reality of the need not to be overexposed to China because of the political dynamics at work. Understanding which segments of their supply chain they see opportunities for helps us get a better understanding of what’s working and what we can help grow as quickly as possible and at scale. That part is very useful.

I would say expanded market access, strategic partnership opportunities on the supply-chain side, and then we also want to make sure that we actually create a space where we can have important intellectual-property conversations.

You guys are obviously very involved in the AI industry, and so I'm sure you've been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole model distillation debate, which is super important to actually protect the economic value of these hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in AI companies. And so, that remains a really important unresolved area of policy where I think getting input from the builders who are closest to the development of this technology is super important.

When we last spoke to you on No Priors, you were just beginning your tenure at the State Department. What has been the biggest surprise? You've been very active since you started.

The biggest surprise is honestly how entrepreneurial the Trump administration has been. I think the stereotype for people who work outside of the government usually focuses on this idea that the government is super bureaucratic. Obviously, that's not to say that the government isn't a massive enterprise. It has lots and lots of people involved and lots of processes.

But the really extraordinary thing is that we have a president who also spent most of his life in the private sector and who really likes speed. The running joke, especially with our current counterparts overseas who deal with the Trump administration, is that we like to move in Trump time because the president, when he likes something, wants it yesterday. And so, that part's really been amazing because the appetite to try new things, the appetite for risk, and the appetite to move really, really fast are highly unusual by government standards and really speak to the philosophy that President Trump brings to bear in the Oval Office.

That part's really been extraordinary, combined with the really great leadership that we've been able to benefit from at the cabinet level—from Secretary Besson, Secretary Lutnick, Secretary Rubio, and Secretary Burgum. It's an incredibly collegial team, and they really operate with a level of professionalism that's been incredibly inspiring for people like me in the sub-Cabinet to be able to benefit from and also work very constructively with our bureaus.

One thing that you've said recently surprised me just in the phrasing. You referred to America as a global underdog, I believe. That's not the way I think of America. Can you explain yourself?

I think it's interesting because the US often thinks of itself as the Navy versus a pirate.

Graham Allison wrote this book years ago called the Thucydides Trap, where he characterized America as the established power and China as the rising power. I actually think one of the really big flaws in that whole line of thinking is that I really wouldn't say we're an established power. For most of our history, one of the things that really makes America quite unique and very different is that, from the earliest days of our founding, we've always been a nation of underdogs.

We started out as 13 disorganized, unruly colonies rebelling against an empire of polite society and the educated expert class, who said that our project as a republic would never succeed. If there really is one through line across our history, it's that in almost any decade in the history of our country, there has been a class of experts that predicted our decline, or that we had reached the limits of our power—whether it was the Great Financial Crisis, the Iraq War, the first and second oil crises, the Vietnam War, or whatever you want to name.

The amazing thing is that Americans perform really, really well when we feel like our backs are against the wall and it's crunch time. I'm sure you'll remember that during COVID, there were these very dramatic Atlantic magazine covers about the great unraveling of America. Against the odds, and despite everyone in the mainstream press, we came out with a vaccine in under a year that actually performed much, much better than every other alternative out there, and came out of COVID much earlier. China, obviously, was bogged down in its zero-COVID policy, the effects of which it's still feeling today.

The reason I say this is because, culturally, it's something that makes America very, very unique. I think it's something that really hits close to home for Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley embodies the quintessence of the underdog mentality. Every founder started out with a contrarian idea that was seen as heretical by the expert class—the sort of polished Harvard professors of the world who think they have these well-founded theses.

You have people who, some of them are dropouts, dare to question old orthodoxies, and hear “no” 45 times before getting to a “yes,” and they keep going. And so, it really is part of the DNA of what makes a founder a really great founder. I think it really is that kind of spirit, that new-frontier mentality, that makes Silicon Valley unique, but that has also characterized America as a nation and allowed us to always bounce back whenever we've experienced a setback.

It makes me really optimistic about the future of our country. My message to founders and executives in Silicon Valley, as well as to our partners overseas, is that I think that is the kind of spirit we want and are looking for when we want to partner with people. It's also the kind of ethos that people should expect from us when they ask themselves, “What can I expect from Americans versus executives from another country, say China?”

I think the answer is that with America, a lot of the time, it's very positive-sum because our companies already work on positive-sum partnerships all around the world. It will involve a lot of tenacity and creative thinking. That's how American founders work.

Thanks so much for joining us today.

No, no. Thank you.

Thanks for doing this follow-up.