As Countries Race to Power AI, a New Global Divide Opens

Split is influencing geopolitics and global economics, creating new dependencies and a rush to not be excluded

- ADAM SATARIANO & PAUL MOZUR

Last month, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, donned a helmet, work boots, and a luminescent high-visibility vest to visit the construction site of the company's new data center project in Texas.

Bigger than New York's Central Park, the estimated $60 billion project, which has its own natural gas plant, will be one of the most powerful computing hubs ever created when completed as soon as next year.

Around the same time as Altman's visit to Texas, Nicolás Wolovick, a computer science professor at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina, was running what counts as one of his country's most advanced AI computing hubs. It was in a converted room at the university, where wires snaked between aging AI chips and server computers.

"Everything is becoming more split," Wolovick said. "We are losing."