There are few things more important to me than the race to reach artificial superintelligence (ASI) first.
Because the first country to develop a superintelligent AI could reshape the global balance of power.
It would help that country solve scientific problems faster than anyone else.
This would lead to better weapons… better energy systems…
It would even help that country control the flow of global capital.
This is why we’re witnessing a global sprint to build the future of AI.
For a while now, I’ve described this as a two-horse race between the U.S. and China.
But is that really true?
A Three-Legged Race
Africa has a population of 1.4 billion.
Despite chronic power shortages and underfunded education systems, the continent is still home to more than a dozen of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
It has a booming population of digital-native youth.
Yet there’s a single research institute at Harvard — not even the university, just one lab — that has more AI computing power than every African-owned data center on the entire continent.
Africa is falling behind in the AI race because it doesn’t have access to the machines that make modern AI possible.
And this isn’t just a problem for Africa.
In South America, Southeast Asia and even in parts of Europe, startups are hitting a wall because they can’t afford access to cloud-based GPUs or build their own infrastructure.
As the world sprints toward ASI, it’s becoming clear that this race isn’t just about who builds the smartest model.
It’s increasingly about who owns the most compute. Meaning, the data centers and chips needed to run these models.
Countries that don’t control their own compute are forced to rent it from those that do. That means their future will be built on someone else’s terms.
Right now, those terms are being dictated by three very different competitors: the United States, China and the European Union.
And each one is using a very different playbook.
In the U.S., the push toward artificial superintelligence is being driven almost entirely by private companies.
These are the companies we often talk about here in The Daily Disruptor…
OpenAI. Google. Meta. Amazon. Microsoft.
Together, these firms are expected to pour more than $300 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone.
That’s almost Canada’s entire national budget.
While these companies are building new data centers, buying up land and power and locking in advanced chips from Nvidia and AMD, the U.S. government has mostly taken a backseat role.
But it’s still handing out support through initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act that earmarks $280 billion for semiconductors and advanced tech.
The U.S. currently hosts over 5,300 data centers.
That’s more than 10 times the amount that China has.
What’s more, nearly all the frontier AI models are American-made.
But that doesn’t mean China is lagging far behind us in the AI race…
Although they’re taking a very different approach than we are.
In China, the government is leading the push on AI with big investments and a national plan.
It intends to win the race by building a fully domestic AI stack. We’re talking Chinese chips, a Chinese cloud, Chinese data and Chinese models.
In fact, China has already rolled out dozens of LLMs through companies like Baidu and Alibaba.
And newer open-source challengers like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI are getting government support to help them accelerate even faster.
The good news for us is that China still lags behind in terms of pure compute.
But with tighter control over its supply chains and massive coordination between government and industry, it could close the gap fast.
Then there’s the European Union.
To its credit, the EU seems to understand the stakes. It has launched a new €200 billion AI plan, with money going toward massive data centers with 100,000+ chips each.
France, Germany and Italy are all bidding to become regional AI hubs.
But they’re facing a significant problem…
Europe’s grid infrastructure simply can’t keep up.
Data centers in places like Frankfurt and Amsterdam now face wait times of up to 13 years to connect to power. And environmental regulations are slowing new construction.
Even EU leaders admit that overregulation could stall innovation. Bosch’s CEO recently warned that the bloc is in danger of regulating “ourselves to death, because we are trying to regulate against technological progress.”
And the numbers prove he’s right.
According to the Stanford AI Index, 40 major AI models came out of the U.S. in 2024, while 15 came out of China.
But just three came from Europe. And all of them were French.
Here’s My Take
The race to ASI is increasingly becoming a race for compute dominance.
Because the more compute you have, the faster you can innovate.
The U.S. is pulling ahead in this race thanks to corporate giants that are willing to spend like sovereign nations.
China is pushing hard to keep up with us by using central planning to build its own closed-loop AI system.
And the EU is trying to compete, but it’s being dragged behind by regulations and power shortages.
This means, unless something drastically changes, most of the world won’t have a say in how ASI unfolds.
Right now, only a few nations have the infrastructure to shape the future of AI.
For everyone else, it’s looking increasingly likely that they’ll have to adapt to a future they didn’t help build.
Regards,
Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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