Way back in December, I wrote about a company called Nvidia which has taken off like a rocket to become one of the largest companies in the world by market cap, fueled by AI’s insatiable demand for specialised chips. The article was titled ‘Levi Strauss and the geopolitics of artificial intelligence’. The premise was this: whoever supplies the ‘picks and shovels’ to the gold rush of AI development will become the richest company on earth.

The picks and shovels are CPUs, or GPUs to be more accurate. GPUs are a special type of CPU that is optimised for parallel processing. Nvidia, a US company, is currently leading the race to provide them, and the prize for winning will be more than just money. It will be political control.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Nvidia Rolls Out New Chips, Claims Leadership of AI PC Race

Now, suddenly, a new contestant has entered the race, heralded by a startling announcement from Sam Altman, the chief of OpenAI.

Before I get to Altman’s announcement and its implications, why are these GPUs so important? The answer lies in the type of mathematics underpinning most of AI, especially in the segments called ‘deep learning’ and ‘neural networks’ which power systems like ChatGPT4. The maths can be computed on any regular old CPU, but these specialised GPUs are purpose fit for the sort of parallelism that AI math requires.

And then there is the bigger geopolitical issue. AI is now generally being hailed as the most important new technological wave in history, with impacts that will rival those of fire, tools, the domestication of agriculture, the wheel, the Gutenberg press, electricity, lighting, mobility, radio, TV and the Internet. Only the impact of AI will be felt much more quickly, not over millennia or centuries but over the next decade or so and probably sooner than that. We will watch it unfold in real-time.

To choose one pithy quote among many, Turing Award-winner Yann LeCun, one of the inventors of machine intelligence, said recently “Our entire information diet is going to be mediated by AI systems — they will constitute the repository of all human knowledge” (emphasis mine).

Manipulation and control 

Which brings us to an obvious conclusion. If any nation were able to control the dissemination of “all human knowledge” to the detriment of others (for instance, by having AI take control of the global Internet), they would be in possession of the most powerful geopolitical tool in history — the ability to remove the line between truth and propaganda and to rewrite history at will. They would quickly win the war of ideas and culture and worldview (which sits at the heart of nation-states) without firing a shot.

Everyone who thinks about global power is terrified of AI, not because AI may enslave or exterminate us, but because those countries which harness the smartest AI will have a weapon which makes nuclear weapons pallid in comparison.

Before we get to Altman’s announcement, one last observation needs to be made. Currently, world production of computer chips is dominated by one country, Taiwan, where the massive semiconductor manufacturing company TSMC has a 40% share of the global market and the most expensive factories ever built. They are the preferred, and sometimes only, destination for the fabrication of semiconductor chips, even those designed elsewhere. This includes chips designed by Nvidia which can’t manufacture them. They need TSMC to do that.

This was all well and good in the era of globalisation. TSMC were by far the best choice — no one else could match their price, their manufacturing excellence, their speed, their reliability. But alas, the world has changed. Globalisation is now a reckless strategy, what with hot wars and cold wars and everywhere the sound of sabres rattling.

The strategists whose job it is to think about these things all have the same terrifying scenario to ponder. It is this — China finally invades Taiwan, as it has promised to do for years. TSMC is now an arm of the CCP. They throttle the production of semiconductors for all perceived enemies, such as the US. And they specifically choke off the supply of AI GPUs for everyone but themselves and their allies — thereby gaining control of the AI ecosystem for the mass-scale export of their worldview and its attendant aspirations.

By the time the rest of the world can respond, it will simply be too late, because, well, he who controls AI controls everything.

The Altman proposition

On Thursday 8 February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sam Altman had been in talks with multiple parties to raise up to $7-trillion to build multiple semiconductor manufacturing facilities in countries outside of Chinese influence.

Let’s gawp at that amount for a moment. $7 trillion. No private company has ever come close to raising that amount. It is more than the national debt of major nations and bigger than the GDP of most developed countries and larger than the size of sovereign funds. It is an impossibly large number, difficult to digest with any coherence and many times larger than even the total size of the global semiconductor market. Which is something of a giveaway as to how important ‘picks and shovels’ are considered to be in the context of the future of tech. And geopolitics.

Who is Altman talking to? Japan. The UAE. The US. Even TSMC. Microsoft. Intel. Basically, anyone from the public or private spheres willing to form an alliance to stave off the threat of Chinese dominance in AI.

Is it too late? These plants take years to plan and build. What if China invades Taiwan tomorrow? Does AI slip from the Western world’s grasp? Does China win the AI race and let slip the cultural dogs of war to turn us into CCP-worshipping compliant citizens?

I don’t know, but Sam Altman seems to feel a little tetchy about it. And he is putting his money where his mouth is, which is not nothing. DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.