Apparently being close to the physical technology has very little to do with actually adopting it.

California is home to every frontier AI lab that matters. New York has more Fortune 500s than any other state. Both got lapped by Colorado, which hit 23.2% business AI adoption while New York managed 13.8%.
What Colorado and Arizona have isn't better infrastructure or talent. It's a willingness to move before the industry signals it's safe to. The states closest to the technology are often the slowest to deploy it because they have the most invested in how things already work.
Three quarters of American businesses still aren't using AI in any meaningful capacity in 2026 and every headline about AI reshaping the economy describes a world 77% of businesses haven't entered.
Despite the models getting better and get cheaper every month. It still comes down to a distribution problem and the layer that solves distribution is never the one that built the product.