The world’s biggest technology companies are accelerating an unprecedented infrastructure push to reach artificial general intelligence, even as the labor and regulatory scaffolding that supports that effort is unraveling.

“You now have the leaders of the biggest technology companies in the world saying, effectively in unison, that they do not care how much it costs to build all the way to A.G.I.,” the Hard Fork podcast observed in a wide-ranging discussion this week. That sentiment has translated into a near‑missionary flow of capital into data centers, specialized chips and cooling farms. Firms have retooled supply chains and signed multi‑year deals for power and semiconductors that analysts say will lock in a new industrial footprint for decades.

The scale of that build-out is colliding with a chronic U.S. immigration system, where H‑1B visas and employment‑based green cards long used to staff Silicon Valley teams are increasingly unreliable. Startups and established firms report longer waits for approvals, higher denial rates, and unpredictability around lottery-based allocations. The result: top engineering talent is either forced to work remotely from abroad, seek alternative countries with friendlier visa regimes, or push companies to automate roles altogether.

The bottleneck is not merely administrative. Immigration lawyers and corporate talent officers warn that the uncertainty is already producing strategic shifts: hiring centers in Canada and India are expanding, and firms are accelerating investments in synthetic data, machine‑learning pipelines and inference tooling that reduce dependence on human experts. For executives focused on the race to AGI, the calculus is stark: if the U.S. cannot reliably supply the engineers it needs, the compute — and the economic returns — will migrate elsewhere.

At the same time, platforms such as TikTok are preparing for the social fallout of hyperconnected, high‑stakes moments. The podcast thread that paired the build-out with “TikTok bracing for the rapture” reflected a real concern inside platforms: sudden viral surges tied to apocalyptic rumors, political mobilization, or system outages can overwhelm moderation and magnify misinformation. Company teams are reportedly beefing up automated moderation, crisis playbooks and server redundancy to temper the reputational risks of mass panic or coordinated disinformation campaigns.

Policy responses lag behind the velocity of change. Lawmakers and regulators have proposed a mix of fixes — expedited visa tracks for AI researchers, targeted export controls for advanced chips, and tougher platform transparency rules — but passage and implementation remain uncertain. Experts caution that piecemeal measures could entrench the dominance of a few hyperscale players while failing to mitigate broader societal harms: concentration of compute power, energy and water demands for cooling, diminished upward mobility for technical workers, and a digital public square more susceptible to viral shocks.

The confluence of an all‑in industrial build for AI, fraying immigration pathways for talent, and platforms braced for societal volatility creates a policy inflection point. If governments do not coherently align migration policy, antitrust scrutiny and platform governance with the needs of a compute‑intensive future, the race to AGI may deliver enormous power to a narrow set of actors — and leave the public and democratic institutions to deal with the consequences.