AI's Geopolitical Chokepoint
The race for AI supremacy is being fought in the wrong arena. While companies compete on model performance and parameter counts, the real strategic advantage lies buried in processing facilities most tech executives have never visited, handling materials most engineers never think about.
The digital economy rests on a physical foundation that most people in that economy never see. Every ChatGPT query, every autonomous vehicle, every data center promising to reshape civilization depends on copper mined in Chile, lithium extracted in Australia, and rare earth elements processed in facilities that look nothing like Silicon Valley campuses.
This isn’t just a supply chain problem. It’s a fundamental constraint on the speed of AI transformation, and it’s creating geopolitical leverage that operates independently of who has the best models.
AI & The Rare Earth Bottleneck with Ernest Scheyder
There’s a fascinating tension at the heart of AI infrastructure that most technical discussions completely miss: the more we digitize, the more we depend on what’s underground. Every optimization algorithm, every autonomous system, every data center promising to replace human labor rests on a foundation of physical extraction that looks nothing like the sleek interfaces we interact with.
Read Also:
