AI and new world order

By Evans Sigomba | Mar. 7, 2025

This will put pressure on both the US and China to even increase the speed at which they are outpacing each other. This means they both need to invest more resources and time to establish their technological dominance.

EVENTS in recent weeks are pointing to the new world order, a world order marked re-imagination of technological nationalism and superior Artificial intelligence (AI) geopolitical competition.

Yes, it will take more than the technological front to undo the global economic dominance of the United States, the emergence of Chinese tech companies as serious challengers in the AI race and the seemingly American unipolarity due to the policies of the new emperor in the palace.

Mostly, a significant factor is a shift in the technology ecosystem. Just by looking at the current trajectory, one can see that the technology new world order is threatening to be a tug of war between the world’s two economic powerhouses, the US and China.

What does this mean to other countries? My opinion is that the other countries will have to make tough decisions and decide which team they will align with.

From my economics background what we are witnessing unfolding before us is a form of economic competition, or we can refer to it as the digital cold war.

Unlike the previous cold war, the digital cold war is an economic war, being fought on the digital front. Technological innovations are the major determinant of geopolitical prowess.

AI is going to be the most decisive technology in this digital cold war. How is that so, it is simple, AI is driven by the vast amount of data it consumes and the most efficient and powerful AI application that consumes and processes more information faster, efficiently, cheaper, and responsibly will emerge as the most preferred application.

Keep Reading

So, for the other countries to choose, which team to side with, they will mostly likely choose the cost-efficient one, that champions collaboration and transformation over competition and disruption.

We were probably thinking that globalisation was a hox or suffering a slow death, the coming in of AI is proving us wrong. Globalisation is moving full steam ahead.

The AI-driven global system is more complicated and vacuous than the original economic global interconnection. In many cases, trade is simply being rerouted rather than shut down.

But how did this begin? It is certainly not a one-way theory it’s a combination of events that do not reflect the US and its policies.

It i s a reaction from China, particularly President Xi Jinping’s pragmatic economic plan titled Made in China Plan. Here, President Xi set out a competitive plan that sets a trajectory to compete and eventually out-compete the US and other global powers in the areas of high technology.

The plan said that China must achieve self-sufficiency in critical technology by 2025. And boom 2025 is upon us DeepSeek is seriously challenging tech giants in Silicon Valley.

As a response, the US has also responded by setting ambitious plans and countermeasures to retain technological supremacy. Setting the stage for the technological cold war, today, AI is arguably the most decisive technology in this global contestation.

The Cold War is set up in two different ecosystems. The US-led ecosystem champions open, democratic, data privacy rights, and individual rights, whilst the China-led ecosystems seem to be championing strong state control, information-flow restriction, and politically hard handling that limits openness.

These are my views that it would be naïve to hope that suddenly China will change its political model, which is driven by strong government control and liberalise its technology development ecosystem.

If we take a look at previous eras, the US, led by Silicon Valley big tech companies, would simply develop a technology and the rest of the world would try to emulate them or simply adopt the technology.

A good example is when the US made mind-blowing technologically advanced personal computers and the internet, they led the rest of the world by implementing a top-down approach.

In cloud computing, American companies dominated through Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. AI is a different ball game altogether. It requires collaboration across all stakeholders.

AI is based on vast amounts of data, which means that the US, China or any country cannot work in isolation. They both need data from different countries to produce efficient AI systems.

AI is primarily developed to solve very complex problems and for it to achieve this, it should be able to access and unlock data from different countries. Plus, the data and finances are so large meaning very few if not no countries are big enough to succeed with AI on their own.

This means having all countries on board. For the US or China to succeed they will need approval or collaborations with other countries to access their data.

This means data should be freely shared between governments and AI technology development companies. So AI technologies that are collaborative will leapfrog the capabilities of those that are individualistic.

Here is the headache for the US and other Western allies, with its sheer size and centralised government model it can make inroads in other countries, and out-compete the multiplicity of models coming from the US or Europe, out of democratic nations, if there is no international coordination.

With the emergency of China as an equally determined foe, the US risks losing its edge if it fails to coalesce around a uniform strategy with other democratic nations.

Additionally, without collaboration, the US could lose as Chinese companies can collaborate with Western, Asian, and African markets, signalling to the world China’s technological dominance and its broader colonisation of digital infrastructure around the world.

To develop the most powerful AI models across sectors, the US or China will need to collaborate with countries adopting data-sharing policies and encouraging the co-creation of AI technological innovations.

In addition to collaborating across countries, if Western companies want to become true market leaders, they will also need to collaborate within their blocks, namely with governmental institutions and civil society.

While most of the current discourse surrounding AI focuses on large language models and other generative capabilities, AI’s most significant long-term impacts will come from how it transforms industries and society as a whole.

And genuine transformation cannot come about if private actors are disconnected from the wider society.

The most successful AI development tech companies will be those that embrace this forward-looking vision and build to endure, by centering a core set of values that align with society and abide by self-regulatory mechanisms.

Both the US and China cannot risk AI going awry and putting countries off track in this competitive race. To win the digital cold war, the US and China must fight to be the market leaders in AI.

To build the best AI companies, they need to prioritise international collaboration and engender a new mindset — one that aims to innovate responsibly and unleash human potential.

Sagomba is a chartered marketer, policy researcher, AI governance and policy consultant, ethics of war and peace research consultant. — Email: [email protected]; LinkedIn: @Dr. Evans Sagomba; X: @esagomba.