The Daily Planet #64: Compute Sovereignty, Part 1

If energy sovereignty is the struggle to control the bloodstream of civilization, compute sovereignty concerns the nervous system - the flows of perception, calculation, and command through which societies sense, decide, and act. The two are inseparable: every datacenter consumes rivers of electricity, and every smart grid depends on computation to balance itself.

Yet they are not identical.

Energy sovereignty asks who owns and governs the capacity to act; compute sovereignty asks who owns and governs the capacity to know and decide. In a world where intelligence has become infrastructure, the second is rapidly overtaking the first as the decisive frontier of political life. Or so the US thinks, for they are betting the (data) farm on it.

The U.S. economy today is characterized by a striking divide between two distinct sectors: the booming artificial intelligence (A.I.) economy and the struggling non-A.I. economy. While the Trump administration's policies such as aggressive tariffs, trade wars, and attacks on institutions like the Federal Reserve have weakened the broader economy, a remarkable surge in A.I. investment is masking these underlying problems.

Capital expenditures on A.I. are expected to reach 2 percent of GDP by 2025, a dramatic increase from less than 0.1 percent in 2022, fueling growth and driving stock market gains, particularly among a handful of large tech companies. This investment boom has nearly doubled economic growth compared to what it might have been without A.I.

However, the benefits of the A.I. boom are unevenly distributed. The non-A.I. economy faces significant challenges: tariffs have pushed inflation higher and slowed growth, hiring has stalled, and youth unemployment has risen to levels not seen in nearly a decade. Moreover, the A.I. sector's capital-intensive nature means it creates relatively few jobs, potentially exacerbating labor market difficulties, especially for young workers. This dynamic echoes past technological booms, such as the 1990s internet surge, where capital concentrated in tech ventures left other sectors underfunded.

Opinion | There Are Two Economies: A.I. and Everything Else

This is worse than putting all your eggs in one basket.