Alejandro Roark: Spectrum Is the Foundation of America’s AI Future
America's physical AI future depends on a balanced spectrum strategy that pairs licensed auctions with expanded unlicensed and shared spectrum, the author urges.
We are standing at the edge of the most significant shift in technology since the smartphone. For years, AI has largely lived in the digital world as chatbots on screens or filters on photos. But we are now entering the era of physical AI, where intelligence moves into the real world to solve real problems.
It is the autonomous drone delivering a life-saving prescription to a rural doorstep in minutes. It is the smart ambulance using real-time imaging to consult with specialists while en route to the hospital. It is cloud gaming and real-time interactive entertainment experiences that stream anywhere without lag. It is the industrial robot helping make American manufacturing more competitive by working alongside human partners.
But none of these physical AI systems can function on yesterday’s connectivity. They require massive, contiguous blocks of mid-band spectrum—the invisible backbone that enables low-latency, high-reliability performance at scale. Delivering this future will require a balanced, forward-looking spectrum strategy.
The upcoming AWS-3 auction is an important step toward that foundation. It will help ensure Americans have faster, more reliable, world-leading wireless networks capable of supporting next-generation AI-enabled services. It also funds the “Rip and Replace” program, helping remove untrusted foreign equipment from U.S. communications networks and replace it with secure American technology, while expanding connectivity in communities that have often been left behind.
Through bidding credits and hyper-local spectrum blocks, it also creates a stronger opportunity to compete, invest, and deploy high-speed 5G service in underserved areas, helping ensure the benefits of AI-driven innovation and economic opportunity reach every community.
But AWS-3 should be understood as the beginning of the next phase of spectrum policy, not the end of the conversation. As demand for connectivity accelerates, spectrum policy is increasingly being asked to balance financial goals with long-term innovation and the efficient use of a finite national resource. If it becomes too focused on maximizing revenue outcomes, policy attention risks drifting away from ensuring spectrum is put to its highest-value uses for American consumers and the broader economy.
The path to true “Spectrum Abundance” is not through managed scarcity or a revenue-first approach but instead requires a balanced strategy that preserves the certainty of licensed spectrum while expanding the capacity of the unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum that powers our homes, schools, and small businesses. We cannot meet our AI ambitions by building 5G “highways” if the Wi-Fi “lanes” that support everyday connectivity fall behind.
As President Trump meets with Chinese leadership this week, technology leadership and connectivity remain an important backdrop to the broader relationship, even if spectrum policy itself is not formally on the agenda. Over time, the United States and China are taking different approaches to how spectrum is organized and deployed.
China’s model tends to emphasize centralized coordination and uniform national rollout, while the United States relies on a more flexible system that combines licensed, shared, and unlicensed spectrum across different use cases.
That difference is not just technical. It will shape how quickly each system can support the next generation of AI applications in the physical world. More centralized models can accelerate large-scale deployment, while more layered systems tend to enable a wider range of innovation at the edge, where many physical AI applications will emerge.
In practice, the competition will be defined less by any single technology and more by which approach better supports both scale and adaptability over time. That tradeoff between uniformity and adaptability will increasingly determine where AI applications are built first and how widely they scale once deployed. The U.S. strength depends on making the right policy choices to balance scale, interoperability, and innovation across different deployment environments.
Our spectrum policy can shape the AI future both countries are racing to define but only if we don't lose sight of what our public airwaves are meant to enable in the first place.
The opportunity ahead is to build on what is already working through strong, predictable licensed auctions like AWS-3, while continuing to expand more flexible and efficient uses of spectrum across the broader ecosystem. The goal is not to choose one model over the other or pursue a single financial objective, but to make these systems work together. A strong licensed foundation provides scale and certainty, while a well-managed unlicensed and shared layer creates room for speed, experimentation, and new applications.
By balancing the certainty of licensed auctions with the flexibility of dynamic sharing, we can ensure that the “physical AI” future is built here, secured here, and accessible to every American. This is how we ensure that American innovation and the consumers who depend on it set the pace for global leadership.
Alex Roark is the CEO of the A-I Policy Forum, a national public-interest organization laying the foundation for an AI future in which every person, community, and institution has the knowledge, tools, and agency to shape how technology is designed, deployed, and governed. Alejandro previously served as a senior executive for the FCC where he led the teams responsible for establishing the first open record on the risks and benefits of AI, which led to the adoption of the first rules across the federal government to govern the use of AI within the context of American telecom. This Expert Opinion is Exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
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