Tech industry leaders, academics and researchers, both local and from around the world, recently met at UC San Diego to discuss the city’s opportunities for growth in computing and artificial intelligence. The Council on Competitiveness, a non-profit aimed at driving economic, innovation-led growth, hosted its event series, “Competitiveness Conversations,” at UC San Diego’s Price Center, bringing together the leaders for panel discussions on San Diego’s position in the national economy.Greater San Diego is home to over 100,000 technology workers and has “one of the nation’s deepest concentrations of engineers and scientists,” said Deborah Wince-Smith, president and CEO of the Council on Competitiveness.According to Wince-Smith, San Diego generates over $54 billion in annual economic output, making it one of the world’s top three hubs for biotechnology. Biotech, along with AI, autonomous systems and advanced computing, are the drivers of national growth, Wince-Smith said. Pradeep Khosla, UCSD’s chancellor, said the university is a driving force behind that growth, bringing in $25 billion for thousands of active research projects.Many of those projects are focused on cancer research. Ludmil Alexandrov, a panel speaker and professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, uses AI to aid his research.“We can now aggregate huge amounts of data and try to assign cancer risk to individuals,” Alexandrov said. He noted low-cost drug creation, quicker diagnoses and treatment optimization as some of the benefits AI has provided.“The compute [processing power] that AI gives us and the tools it gives us has really transformed the whole journey from being a healthy individual to hopefully never getting cancer,” Alexandrov said.The computing necessary to write this code requires large amounts of electricity that can only be provided by supercomputers, which research increasingly demands, according to Alexandrov. Other research, in stem cells, aging and semiconductors, also uses AI to accelerate findings.Because energy and water, resources required by AI, are so costly in San Diego, running large-scale computing “puts San Diego at a disadvantage,” said Ramesh Rao, director of the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. The possible answer is to run these centers elsewhere, Rao said. Tapping into nearby locations with cheap water and electricity would power these centers in a cost-effective way, to meet the processing needs. Rao, who moderated a panel, agreed that partnerships would come out of the July 21 event, although he didn’t reveal them. Data from the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC) shows that San Diego received $3 billion in Venture Capital funding in the first quarter of 2026 — 80% of it to an AI deal. Mark Cafferty, president and CEO of the EDC, said San Diego is at an inflection point.“Our goal is to develop a series of economic roadmaps—defense innovation, early-stage technologies, international trade and other focus areas—to determine just what opportunities San Diego must be investing in (and what big bets we should be making) to ensure a successful and competitive future for our region.”According to the EDC, there will be projects coming in the fall to attract more investments like those seen in the first quarter.“Regardless of what the direction is that the innovation ecosystem takes on in San Diego, I know it will be supported because that’s the story of San Diego, and that support just continues to grow,” Cafferty said.
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