The Geopolitics of Compute: AI and the Reindustrialization of Nations
The AI revolution is becoming synonymous to electricity in the 20th century, oil during industrialization and nuclear capability during the Cold War. Countries are no longer seeing AI as ‘just tech’. They are seeing it as an economic infrastructure, military leverage, geopolitical power and critical to national security. Nations globally want to build their own indigenous AI stack and systems to maintain self-sufficiency especially in the current times as deglobalization and supply chain vulnerabilities are becoming visible. Governments fear dependence on foreign AI for critical systems such as military software dependent on foreign cloud providers, national data processed externally and emergency infrastructure controlled by foreign AI systems. That creates strategic vulnerability. A country dependent on foreign AI systems risks surveillance, hidden backdoors, sanctions, cutoff from compute access, manipulation of information and economic dependence. Therefore nations like the...
