Centralization of Compute and Data

1.The current governance issue: Describe the present governance problem in a concise paragraph. State who is affected and why it matters legally or institutionally.

Advanced AI currently depends on a narrow group of tech giants<ref>Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle collectively hold an estimated 71% of the world’s cumulative AI compute as of Q4 2025, measured in H100-equivalents of computing power.

Luke Emberson, Josh You and Venkat Somala (2026), "Five hyperscalers now own over two-thirds of global AI compute". Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved from 'https://epoch.ai/data-insights/hyperscalers-control-most-compute' [online resource]. Accessed 7 Sept 2026.</ref> and semiconductor oligopolies controlling microchips and software, hyperscale cloud infrastructure, large datasets, frontier models, and distribution platforms. This presents a governance problem where this narrow group exercises control over foundational digital infrastructure. This directly affects consumer choice and prices most businesses out of AI. Legally and institutionally, this matters because it creates a profound democratic deficit: this neutralizes antitrust frameworks designed for traditional markets, often bypassing conventional copyright and data privacy protections through unchecked data harvesting thereby complicating enforcement.This ultimately might affect national sovereignty as the countries that host the buildout will shape the future of AI: who controls it, what values it contains, how it is used.<ref>Alasdair Phillips-Robins, Teddy Tawil and Sam Winter-Levy, ‘The Compute Coalition: How to Build the Future of AI in the Free World’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 8 June 2026) https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/06/the-compute-coalition-how-to-build-the-future-of-ai-in-the-free-world accessed 7 September 2026.</ref>

2. Historical lineage: Identify three to five historical moments, decisions, or institutional arrangements that help explain the issue. Explain the connection between the historical event and the present arrangement.

In 1987, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was founded, establishing the world’s first semiconductor fab. Instead of designing and making its own chips, TSMC only manufactured chips designed by other companies. Today, nearly 100% of the world's most advanced AI processors are manufactured by TSMC, leaving the entire global AI compute supply chain centralized under one company.

In 2006, Nvidia launched CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a free software layer that allowed developers to use Nvidia's graphics chips (GPUs) which later became perfect for training deep neural networks. Today, this creates a near-monopoly on AI compute hardware.

Soon after Amazon launched AWS<ref>Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud computing platform</ref>, Microsoft and Google launched their own cloud platforms marking the structural pivot to the cloud service provider model, shifting computing from a distributed architecture (where companies bought and managed their own physical servers) to a centralized infrastructure. As training modern AI models requires tens of thousands of GPUs, today’s frontier AI companies are entirely dependent on the extremely expensive physical infrastructure of a handful of cloud hyper-scalers (Microsoft, Google, AWS, and Meta).

In 2009, Fei-Fei Li launched ImageNet, a massive database of over 14 million images, which proved that AI model performance scales directly with data volume. This created an immediate institutional advantage for consumer internet platforms (like Google and Meta), because they were already architected to collect, centralize, and store masses of user data through search engines and social networks, they possessed the unique data stack required to train high-performing AI.

3. Mechanism of path dependence: Specify the mechanism or mechanisms at work. For example: increasing returns or network effects; standardisation; switching costs; installed base or legacy infrastructure; legal or contractual entrenchment; professional norms and expertise; organisational routines; procurement and funding structures; cultural or political imaginaries.

The centralization of AI compute and data is a classic case of technological lock-in. When structural choices were made decades ago, they triggered powerful, self-reinforcing loops. One such loop is the switching costs and software standardisation. As developers have spent more than a decade working with CUDA, moving to a rival hardware provider (or a decentralized compute network) requires an enterprise to completely rewrite its foundational software stack. The cost of code migration, developer retraining, and potential hardware downtime force companies to stay tied to dominant hardware monopolies such as Nvidia’s CUDA. Commitments, licensing conditions, and exclusivity provisions add contractual costs. Fewer than 1% of cloud customers switch provider annually, identifying technical differentiation and data-transfer charges as important barriers<ref>Competition and Markets Authority, Cloud Infrastructure Services: Final Decision Report (31 July 2025) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688b8891fdde2b8f73469544/final_decision_report.pdf accessed 7 September 2026.</ref>.

Network effects also matter for computing power. More customers generate more revenue, usage information, and opportunities to improve infrastructure and models. Better services attract additional users and developers, whose applications make the platform more valuable. In cloud–AI partnerships, providers may additionally obtain information about model performance and future infrastructure demand. These feedback loops strengthen firms already operating across cloud, models, software, and distribution.

4. Politics and distribution: Drawing especially on Winner, Beniger, and/or Barbrook and Cameron: whose interests, values, capacities, or forms of authority are strengthened by this trajectory? Who bears costs or has fewer choices?

According to Langdon Winner's definition, modern AI computing infrastructure may qualify as an "inherently political technology" because its large scale and significant financial requirements not only lend themselves to, but necessitate,<ref>Langdon Winner, 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?' (1980) 109(1) Daedalus 121, 128.</ref> centralized, hierarchical control. The physical siting of this infrastructure shows evidence of Winner’s second category of politicization of technologies, the ‘political arrangement’:<ref>Ibid. 123.</ref> Of the five largest U.S. AI firms, four are headquartered in California<ref>OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI. xAI is an exception to the rule, domiciled between Palo Alto, CA and San Antonio, TX.</ref>, while just one is (partially) domiciled in Texas. Texas, however, hosts twice the GPU clusters.<ref>Texas’ 17 to California’s 8, cf. Texas Royalty Brokers, 'AI Clusters by State' (Texas Royalty Brokers, 2025) https://texasroyaltybrokers.com/ai-clusters-by-state/ accessed 7 September 2026.</ref> This placement geographically insulates beneficiaries of the data infrastructure boom from its negative externalities.

The specific choice of location may itself be a deliberate preference on account of Texas’ unique approach to water usage rights.<ref>The ‘rule of capture’, established in Houston & TC Railway Co v East (Tex 1904), permits landowners to extract groundwater beneath their land without liability for depleting adjacent wells or aquifers, a doctrine now exploited by hyperscale AI data centres to draw large cooling-water volumes with minimal regulatory constraint.</ref> Juxtaposition of this unequal and even exploitative balance of interests with the pontificating rhetoric of the urban, information rich, beneficiaries is evocative of the internal contradictions of the Californian Ideology - the virtual artisans existence and privileged position is still based on the exploitation of a vulnerable out-group, the "information-rich" consuming the output, the "information-poor" hosting the extraction.<ref>Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, 'The Californian Ideology' (1996) 6(1) Science as Culture 44.</ref>

5. Contingency and alternatives Identify one historical point at which a different trajectory was plausible. What was the alternative, why did it not prevail, and what might it have changed?

Profit motive and economies of scale now concentrate investment among a few hyperscalers,<ref>Goldman Sachs, 'Global AI Investment Is Forecast to Exceed $1 Trillion in 2026' (Goldman Sachs Insights, 7 August 2026) https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/global-investment-is-forecast-to-exceed-1-trillion-in-2026 accessed 7 September 2026.</ref> but this reflects policy choice, not government incapacity: Compute infrastructure may be inherently political, but the technology is agnostic as to where the organizing authority originates, and states have historically funded infrastructure of comparable or greater scale, while facing less pressure to show short-term returns.

The clearest turning point was 1995, when the National Science Foundation retired NSFNET, the publicly funded backbone that had connected U.S. research and supercomputing centers since the mid-1980s,<ref>National Science Foundation, 'Birth of the Commercial Internet' (NSF Impacts) https://www.nsf.gov/impacts/internet accessed 7 September 2026.</ref> handing internet infrastructure to commercial providers with no conditions attached. This was a deliberate policy decision made amid the deregulatory push of the Clinton era. The privatization that followed ushered in the private industrial dominance that persists today in the form of hyperscalers. Had a publicly governed backbone instead been scaled up, today's compute infrastructure might rest on a different foundation entirely.

6. Governance implication: Conclude with one proposition for present-day governance. It could concern regulation, public procurement, standards, institutional design, public investment, archival policy, or democratic oversight. Be explicit about what history changes in the proposed intervention.

Despite private hyperscaler dominance, the U.S. does have a nominal public alternative: the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), established following the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 and piloted from January 2024, which explicitly aims to democratize access to the computational resources essential to AI research.<ref>CASRAI, 'NAIRR: National AI Research Resource, Explained' (CASRAI) https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/national-ai-research-resource-nairr accessed 7 September 2026.</ref>

In Europe, a comparable program is the EuroHPCJU,<ref>Council Regulation (EU) 2021/1173 of 13 July 2021 on establishing the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking and repealing Regulation (EU) 2018/1488 [2021] OJ L256/1.</ref> an initiative intended to pool resources to build supercomputing capacity. The undertaking’s legislative basis has since been extended to include networked ‘AI factories', as well as the so-called “Gigafactories”.<ref>Council Regulation (EU) 2026/150 of 16 January 2026 amending Regulation (EU) 2021/1173 on establishing the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking [2026] OJ L 2026/150.</ref> The framing in language of sovereignty indicates intent to at least compete with private infrastructure initiatives.

Though government-led measures cannot reverse the centralization of compute, they can democratize access - provided they are intensified. The European Commission has “set a goal of investing more than €1 billion per year in AI research and innovation”.<ref>European Commission, 'Realising Europe's Digital Decade' (European Commission, 11 October 2024) https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/story-von-der-leyen-commission/realising-europes-digital-decade_en accessed 7 September 2026.</ref> While laudable in its own right, it pales in comparison to the investments of industry leaders, which are approaching, if not exceeding, trillions of Dollars.

Centralization of Compute and Data

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