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Brookings Panelists: AI Stack Already Showing Signs of Market Concentration

Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler warned that two-thirds of AI compute is controlled by three companies.

Akul Saxena

Dec 9, 2025 — 2 min read

Photo of panel (from left) Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings; Chris Lewis, president of Public Knowledge; Karen Kornbluh, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and former U.S. ambassador to the OECD; and former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler speaking on an AI governance in Washington on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9, 2025 — Brookings scholars said Monday that artificial intelligence risked repeating the internet’s consolidation cycle and urged Congress to adopt modern rules as control over compute, data, and large models becomes increasingly concentrated.

Nicol Turner Lee, director of Brookings’s Center for Technology Innovation, said the United States faced “another digital divide, an AI chasm” unless policymakers updated rules governing access, safety, and participation. She said AI’s growth lacked “the regulatory cadence” that shaped telecom and the early internet, producing uneven benefits across regions and income groups.

Turner Lee said the future internet would be defined not only by traditional network infrastructure but also by access to compute power, the cloud-based processing required to run large AI models. Without intervention, she said, the country risked “a bigger chasm” in which communities without strong network infrastructure would be shut out of emerging AI tools.