Essays about artificial intelligence, geopolitics, infrastructure control, and technology power dynamics.
AI, geography, and the exposed infrastructure of the new intelligence age Part 1 examined the vulnerability map. It established that AI infrastructure is physical, globally distributed, and structurally exposed. That essay was about exposure. This one is about chokepoints. Because once infrastructure is exposed, its narrowest passages become points of control. Exposure tells you where … Read more
AI, geography, and the exposed infrastructure of the new intelligence age Approximately three weeks ago, I wrote an essay titled “AI Has a Geography Now.” In it, I argued that advanced AI is no longer just a software story. It is increasingly shaped by land, energy, water, data centers, cables, substations, chips, legal jurisdictions, physical … Read more
The most important AI risks in 2026 are not at the model layer. They sit lower down, in memory, networking, power, cloud access, and the physical systems that keep AI running. That is where the real leverage is. These bottlenecks decide who can scale, who gets delayed, and who ends up dependent on someone else’s … Read more
For years, AI was talked about as if it lived nowhere. It was “in the cloud,” which made it sound borderless, weightless, almost detached from the physical world. But that was always only half true. The cloud has buildings. It has land, substations, cooling systems, permits, cables, backup power, and legal jurisdictions. It can be … Read more
Supporting AI’s development does not mean suspending judgment about its costs. In an age of climate anxiety, societies are being asked to accept a great many things on faith. Build more transmission. Build more batteries. Build more solar. Build more nuclear. Build more cooling. Build more computation. Much of that may in fact be necessary. … Read more