In the race to harness the power of cloud computing, and further develop artificial intelligence, academics have a new concern: falling behind a fast-moving tech industry. In the US, 22 higher education institutions, including Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, have signed up to a National Research Cloud initiative seeking access to the computational power they need to keep up. It is one of several cloud projects being called for by academics globally, and is being explored by the US Congress, given the potential of the technology to deliver breakthroughs in healthcare and climate change. Under the US proposal, authored by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, a national cloud platform would enable more academic and industry researchers to work at the leading edge of AI, and help train a new generation of experts. Li and Etchemendy's NRC proposal cautions about declining government funding for basic and foundational research and highlights the US's history of federally funding research into innovations -- from gene sequencing to the internet itself.