ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.

The sudden -- even by tech standards -- pivot to AI hasn't just left businesses scrambling to play catch-up; even America's spy agencies are struggling to keep up.

This is why the government has given the thumbs-up to a secret $9 billion request for superchips that will allow the CIA and NSA to keep up with what big AI players like Anthropic and OpenAI are doing.

The latest batch of AI models needs a massive amount of computing power -- not to mention a huge supply of power and specialized cooling that comes as part of cutting-edge, modern-day data centers -- to run, and the silicon to deliver this is Nvidia's Grace Blackwell superchips, named after American mathematician David Blackwell and American computer scientist and Navy pioneer Grace Hopper.