Charlie Edwards
Donald Trump launched his second presidential term with the announcement of a US$500 billion initiative to build the physical and virtual infrastructure needed to support developments in artificial intelligence (AI). The Stargate initiative has attracted much attention, including questions over its financing, but its goal is more prosaic. The initiative is Donald Trump’s attempt to unify the private and public sectors in a common mission and reduce the political hurdles and infrastructure bottlenecks that stymied progress under his predecessor.
The AI ambitions of the United States, China and the European Union are constrained by insufficient underlying infrastructure, including old national energy grids; inadequate data centres; and unreliable and unsustainable energy supplies. But the competition for AI dominance may increasingly come to be defined by states’ sovereign AI capabilities and their ability to export them.
Gridlock
A key determinant of becoming a global leader in AI is the ability to build an efficient, sustainable and resilient infrastructure that ensures energy is available, reliable and constant. The state of national power grids in China, the EU, and the US remains a significant barrier. China’s creaking grid represents a major constraint to progress and the government is planning to invest more than US$800bn over the next six years. The investment will support Beijing’s Eastern Data, Western Computing initiative, which aims to tap into China’s energy resources in the west and transfer computing power to economic hubs along the coast.
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