Copyright mondediplo
In February this year President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a new stage in France’s national AI strategy – a €109bn private investment plan blending UAE sovereign wealth, Canadian pension money, American private equity and French household names (Iliad, Orange, Thales). These last all run on Blackwell GPUs from US giant Nvidia, maker of the most widely used semiconductors in the AI sector and one of the world’s biggest companies by market capitalisation. In September the UK announced a £150bn ‘tech prosperity deal’. Germany is not far behind. The same scenario has played out from the Middle East to Southeast Asia: Nvidia promises to help you break your addiction to US technology by buying US-made chips on terms set by a US firm. ‘Sovereignty’ means the privilege of writing cheques to the US in its own currency. Nvidia puts a lot of effort into maintaining the collective frenzy. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s leather-jacketed CEO, repeats the mantra at summit after summit – ‘Own the production of your intelligence’ – and finance ministers nod along. The implied path to salvation is: buy our chips to escape the tyranny of OpenAI and its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT. What Huang doesn’t mention is that Nvidia plans to invest $100bn in the very monster his sovereignty doctrine promises to defeat. And for every $10bn Nvidia invests in OpenAI, it makes $35bn back in chip sales – a mechanism that functions so smoothly it almost achieves perpetual motion. Better still, Nvidia doesn’t even sell the chips – it leases them. This pales compared to the trillion-dollar computing infrastructure deals OpenAI signed this year, along with agreements that will potentially give it as much power as 20 nuclear reactors. Much of this massive spending will flow back to the likes of Nvidia and AMD, in which OpenAI has just taken a major stake. Such incestuous deals, normally a sign of a bubble in the making, are not just tolerated but even encouraged by the never-ending search (…)
