Like it or not, AI has become part of modern warfare and well as part of the surveillance state (good for crime fighting, not for privacy), so it is an important part of national security, and you'd prefer to be as much self-sufficient for that as you can be.

Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.