Artificial intelligence, big tech dominates the digital revolution
Equilibria. Capitalisation of major corporations influences geopolitics, challenging traditional political mechanisms
The new masters of steam do not wear crowns, but grey sweatshirts and thousand-dollar trainers. The map of world power today is not drawn in the chancelleries, but in the data centres of Silicon Valley and Seattle. If Elon Musk plays demiurge with xAI and Sam Altman seeks trillions to rewrite the fate of humanity with OpenAI, Sundar Pichai must defend Google's fortress from the greatest threat in its history. But the chess game of artificial intelligence would not be complete without Satya Nadella, who has turned Microsoft into the central bank of AI, and without Amazon's Aws, who is the landlord of the new economy, the landlord who rents out his computational muscles to anyone who wants to try and challenge the gods. And then there are the Chinese players, the new AI models that focus on low cost and lower energy consumption than Western algorithms.
This is why the Trento Festival of Economics becomes the place to try and unplug to understand what is happening under the hood. At the centre of the debate are the digital empires that are rewriting the old and new globalisation: Paolo Benanti, chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Committee at the Department for Information and Publishing of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, and Sabino Cassese, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. They are the protagonists who will pull the strings to further frame the role of the digital emperors.
This is not just an algorithmic gold rush, but a profound restructuring of the foundations of our technical civilisation. If the West Coast giants act as the new railway barons, silicon and energy have become the rails and coal of this century. Competitive advantage is no longer played out solely on software sophistication, but on the ability to hoard gigawatts of power and millions of chips. In this scenario, the advancement of Chinese models is not mere background noise: their research into 'light' and energy-sustainable algorithms represents a concrete attempt to unhinge the dominance of Californian silicon, reducing the barriers to entry for the rest of the globe.
But the real Gordian knot enveloping these empires is not technological, it is political. The risk is the establishment of a 'digital feudalism' where citizens become subjects of platforms they have not elected, but on which they depend for all social and economic interaction.
This is where Benanti and Cassese's reflection becomes urgent: how can public law keep up with a technology that changes at exponential speed?
