AI Empires Are Rising—and Most of the World Is Locked Out
The next Cold War won’t be fought with missiles, it’ll be fought with GPUs, and over 150 countries have already lost without even knowing they were at war.
A new global fault line is forming, not between ideologies or economies, but between countries with AI compute power and those without. While OpenAI’s Texas mega-facility flexes billions in investment and its own gas plant, other countries scrape by with outdated chips.
The U.S. and China now operate 90% of the world’s advanced AI data centers. Everyone else, from Brazil to Kenya, rents access, if they can afford it.
This isn’t just about cloud storage. AI trained in dominant languages like English and Chinese is reshaping science, warfare, and economic policy. Nations without sovereign compute are finding their top talent lured abroad, their regulations bypassed, and their futures dictated by foreign cloud giants.
Oxford’s data shows the divide isn’t closing, despite efforts from Brazil, India, the EU, and Africa’s Cassava initiative:
- 32 nations hold nearly all AI data centers
- U.S. and China dominate chip supply and influence
- Africa’s upcoming Cassava hub may meet just 20% of demand
We often talk about digital transformation, but what happens when the very infrastructure of transformation is inaccessible? As compute becomes the new oil platforms (after all, data is already the new oil), will we invest in sovereign digital infrastructure, or watch the foundations of our autonomy be leased out byte by byte?
Are we ready to confront the geopolitical consequences of outsourced intelligence?
Read the full article on New York Times.
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