Geopolitical Shifts in Tech
Understanding how global power dynamics influence technology adoption.
1. Technology as Infrastructure of Power
For most of history, power was measured in land, armies, and natural resources. Today, a large share of strategic leverage flows through semiconductors, data centers, undersea cables, cloud platforms, and AI capabilities.
Whoever shapes the technology stack shapes the behavior of billions of people who depend on it.
2. Supply Chains, Standards, and Spheres of Influence
Modern tech geopolitics is less about owning a single factory and more about controlling key chokepoints in complex supply chains: chip fabrication, advanced lithography, cloud infrastructure, app stores, and standards bodies.
- Supply Chains: Where are chips designed, produced, packaged, and assembled?
- Standards: Whose protocols, encryption schemes, and APIs become defaults?
- Regulation: Which jurisdictions set the privacy, AI, and security rules others must follow?
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3. Feedback Loops Between Policy and Innovation
Policies aimed at national security—export controls, data localization, AI safety rules—feed back into where companies build, what they invest in, and which technologies scale. These choices then reshape the landscape policymakers are trying to control.
This is a classic systems thinking problem: interventions at one point in the system can have delayed, unintended effects elsewhere. It mirrors how tweaking a fitness function in a genetic algorithm can produce surprising evolutionary paths.
4. Agentic AI and Strategic Autonomy
As agentic AI takes on more operational roles—planning logistics, running infrastructure, detecting threats—the question of who owns and governs these agents becomes geopolitical. A country that relies on foreign-controlled agents for critical infrastructure inherits foreign policy constraints along with the code.
Data, models, and agents can become the new “bases” and “treaties” of the digital era.
5. Trust as a Strategic Resource
Citizens must trust that digital systems respect their rights. Companies must trust that rules will not change arbitrarily. States must trust that other states will not weaponize interdependence. This web of trust, or mistrust, is itself infrastructure.
The same way trust underpins interpersonal relationships and teams, it underpins alliances and supply chains. See “Trust: The Invisible Currency” for the micro-level analogue.