As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly central to economic innovation and national security, control over computing resources is emerging as a new pillar of geopolitical power .
The paradox you highlight about sovereignty requiring cooperation is especially striking. When even the US and EU can't achieve full semiconductor independence alone, smaller nations face an impossible choice between fragmenting into inefficient silos or accepting dependency. The consolidation you mention with 70% of cloud capacity in nine providers creates a structural vulnerability that transcends any single nation's control. What's missing from most sovereignty discussions is how this concentraton of compute power in companies like AWS, Tencent, and Alibaba might actually be more stable than a world of purely national champions, at least until the geopolitical tensions force fragmentation anyway.
Malaysia would rather strike a deal with AWS than the NSA but they would prefer having their own national champion, except that it’s hard, if not impossible, to create one. Maybe ASEAN could do it for all member countries. Losing economic sovereignty has been devastating for nominally independent countries and I don’t doubt that will be the case for compute sovereignty as well.
The paradox you highlight about sovereignty requiring cooperation is especially striking. When even the US and EU can't achieve full semiconductor independence alone, smaller nations face an impossible choice between fragmenting into inefficient silos or accepting dependency. The consolidation you mention with 70% of cloud capacity in nine providers creates a structural vulnerability that transcends any single nation's control. What's missing from most sovereignty discussions is how this concentraton of compute power in companies like AWS, Tencent, and Alibaba might actually be more stable than a world of purely national champions, at least until the geopolitical tensions force fragmentation anyway.
Malaysia would rather strike a deal with AWS than the NSA but they would prefer having their own national champion, except that it’s hard, if not impossible, to create one. Maybe ASEAN could do it for all member countries. Losing economic sovereignty has been devastating for nominally independent countries and I don’t doubt that will be the case for compute sovereignty as well.