[arcanus]

I'm not sure that is a problem...historically the department of Energy (DOE) has lead Supercomputing efforts in the USA and they have focused on other domains of interest (particularly nuclear weapons research). This field is actually not unrelated, in terms of HPC capabilities, Numerical linear algebra, etc to the recent AI work. But physical simulation remains the top priority in part because AI is not seen as an energy technology.

I can state without hesitation that some of the greatest minds in Supercomputing and computational science are permanent members of the staff at these DOE research labs. These staff are selected much like the top AI researchers: academic pedigree and publications in top tier research journals.

Therefore, I think it is more a problem of application. Until government has a killer AI app, it will be hard to justify a massive investment in AI tech at scale. Contrast that with large companies who have already deployed AI tech in production...