Amid the ongoing U.S.-China tech rivalry, high-stakes stories are happening beyond either country’s borders. I’m particularly interested in how a decoupling of U.S. and Chinese technology partnerships and supply chains would affect private companies and other nations — in unexpected ways.
For example, take Microsoft’s $1.4 billion investment in G42, the leading AI firm of the United Arab Emirates. The deal is important to Microsoft because it involves plans to build a massive geothermal-powered data center in Kenya for high-speed cloud and AI services, among other regional projects. The computing power needed to train AI requires an astonishing amount of natural resources.
