-Analysis-
PARIS — There’s a new global divide in the making. It is likely to structure tomorrow’s world even more than traditional cultural or religious differences. It is one that will split our futures one made up of those countries with the infrastructures needed to develop artificial intelligence, and those without.
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A report by Oxford University has listed for the first time the countries that are home to the mega data centers that constitute the architecture of the cloud, the data storage essential to the development of AI. There are 32 countries on this list, representing 16% of all nations. Those centers are mainly in the U.S. and China, unsurprisingly, but also in Europe.
The concentration is even greater if we take into account the companies that are investing in the field. The rest of the world is left sharing the crumbs, with Africa and Latin America the major underdogs for the time being.
Hierarchy of nations
AI is not just a technology, it’s a societal revolution that is transforming everything from the way we wage war to practice medicine to conduct business. Being on the side of the “insiders” is therefore a major issue for the future. In his book Homo Deus, published in 2015, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari asserted that the gap between these two categories of countries would never be bridged, unlike the industrial revolution of the 19th century, which eventually reached the whole world.
This division carries the risk of entrenching a hierarchy of nations, with an impact on their economies, their ability to keep their best talents at home, and to defend their interests in an even more unequal world.
The New York Times recently reported on the case of researchers in Kenya who were forced to rent supercomputer time abroad, and had to work at night so as not to disturb other Internet users, due to the lack of suitable infrastructures in their country.
Putin’s choice
Back in 2012, one political leader said ahead of time that the country that would dominate artificial intelligence would dominate the world. And that leader was… Vladimir Putin! Paradoxically, the Russian president didn’t follow through on this vision and instead embarked on an old-fashioned imperial policy. Unlike its Chinese friend, Russia is not one of the AI industry’s leaders.
The Sino-American rivalry for leadership in the 21st century largely takes place in the field of technology, and AI in particular. The United States has tried to limit and then ban exports of the most sophisticated semiconductors needed for AI development, those from leading company Nvidia; but this has instead boosted China’s semiconductor sector, with companies like Huawei and Alibaba rapidly catching up.
Having data centers belonging to foreign companies on your soil is no guarantee of sovereignty.
Europe is still lagging far behind, but it does have the essential infrastructure: power generation, digital networks and skills. For example, one of the giant projects announced in France will consume the equivalent electricity of the new Normandy-based Flamanville nuclear power plant.
The stakes are all about sovereignty — but beware, having data centers belonging to foreign companies on your soil is no guarantee of sovereignty. These are the attributes of power in the 21st century. The list of those 32 countries in the Oxford report sketches out a digital apartheid that will be very difficult to overcome.
