Jared Cohen
Where industrial revolutions happen can reshape global affairs. Britain’s Industrial Revolution made London the center of an empire upon which the sun never set. The digital age took off in Silicon Valley, making the United States home to world-leading technology companies. But if AI leads to the next industrial revolution, that revolution will have been global from the beginning. And in the most chaotic period in world affairs since at least the Cold War, building the infrastructure to sustain the AI revolution is a geopolitical test that companies and countries alike will need to pass.
AI is a general-purpose technology. But unlike previous general-purpose technologies, such as electricity or steam engines, AI-enabled tools proliferated so quickly that cutting-edge innovations became widely available almost overnight, in the form of chatbots, image generators, and—increasingly—virtual co-pilots. The AI industry also depends on a network of global commercial partners, including not only U.S. and Chinese technologies, but also Taiwan’s semiconductor fabrication plants, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines made in the Netherlands, and other critical supply chain inputs. Competition over AI has so far been dominated by debates about leading-edge semiconductors, but the next phase is also about geography and power. Specifically, where can the data centers that power AI workloads be built? And who has the capital, energy, and infrastructure needed to power the data centers where AI workloads run?
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