Global Dialogues

We speak of AI as a race; most of the world lives on the waitlist. In a world ridden with violence, climate shocks, and an AI revolution that feels imposed from elsewhere, powerlessness shows up as exclusion from the tools that now shape agency. The machines that power modern AI sit in a few capitals and just a handful of firms. If democratic agency is the power to act, then compute, or shared access to these powerful machines, is the power to act with today’s tools. After a summer working at OpenAI, it became evident to me: the global bottleneck is governance and compute. A practical answer is to pair shared public compute with shared rules of access so that international and youth-inclusive communities can build together. And then keep on building.

Call it a non-aligned compute movement. The political logic behind the term “non-aligned” borrows from the Cold War Non-Aligned Movement, hinting at strategic autonomy, or more specifically, sovereign, interoperable pools of public compute that refuse dependency on any single power or vendor so that communities can truly cooperate. The diplomatic precedent already exists. In March 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted the first global AI resolution by consensus, urging capacity-building and international cooperation for developing countries, a move from conversation to logistics.

Start from the South. India’s IndiaAI Mission is setting up a public-private facility with tens of thousands of AI chips and a subsidized “AI-as-a-Service” marketplace aimed at students and researchers, offering access to academia, startups, and small businesses. Across the continent, the African Union’s 2024 Continental AI Strategy lays out how to build governance and infrastructure at varying levels of readiness. Nodes can pilot student fellowships and cross-border capstones.

Now connect to Europe’s shared infrastructure. The EU is rolling out AI Factories, publicly supported supercomputing hubs for researchers, startups, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), ideal anchors for time-sharing agreements with Global South partners. Barcelona’s site, for instance, upgraded around the MareNostrum-5 supercomputer, is framed explicitly as an open door for EU talent and projects.

Rules make the community durable: we must build communities as carefully as we build machines. Eligibility rubrics, local safeguard reviews for schools and health, transparent scheduling, and an ombudsperson give users recourse and a civic habit of trust. We must publish weekly activity summaries and require that a publicly funded compute yields public artifacts, be it datasets, notebooks, or briefs.

Practice then sustains itself. Students in Nairobi working on flood early-warning can collaborate with peers in Barcelona, while diaspora mentors can return knowledge and networks to their hometowns. Weekly exchanges, open logs and co-authored briefs ensure continuous cooperation.

Non-aligned compute accomplishes two objectives at once: it spreads capacity to counter powerlessness, and it builds international and youth-inclusive communities that share knowledge openly across projects. This is a different politics of technology, with power shared as infrastructure and kept alive only by civic habit. Such practice takes the form of fraternity: showing up weekly, shipping in the open, and leaving the door open wider for the next team.

Joy Yang (C'27) is a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown University.