AI and Geopolitics
Collaborators:
Tatiana Carayannis
Alondra Nelson
Marie-Therese Png
The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals and the AI Supply Chain
A new age of artificial intelligence requires a new governance paradigm that apprehends and attends to the full AI value chain. Typically, the AI value chain stops with the AI stack–the data, chips, and cloud infrastructures that enable the development of AI systems and models. But effective AI global governance will require that we consider the vast ecosystem of resources, significantly derived from Global South countries, that are indispensable for the building of hardware, the running of software, and the deployment of the products developed by multinational corporations in the Global North. This value chain includes the extraction of natural resources–including water, critical minerals, and land–on which the booming AI economy is dependent. It reaches across multiple geographies, and spans from critical mineral sourcing for necessary technology infrastructure components to AI model training and deployment. From this perspective, it becomes clear that contributions to the AI stack, and any attendant benefits, traverse the Global South and the Global North, rather than traveling in a narrow development vector from the latter to the former. The centrality and indispensability of the Global South to the AI value chain thus flips the dominant development narrative that erases the Global South as a resource rich dependency of the Global North economies and industries.