compute
Assorted links for 15 September 2026
Six links: survey collectors across 3.4 million households systematically dropping the people who cost most to reach, a World Bank survey finding 44 per cent of government AI use is individual staff working ad hoc, nominal AI GDP put at roughly $250 billion, Rwanda approving a national AI agency, Africa holding under 1 per cent of the world's data centres, and an index that scores deployability rather than capability.
Assorted links for 2 September 2026
Six links: six Indian digital public infrastructure systems with no forum for public participation, the IMF on cyber losses and financial stability, OpenAI pausing reinforcement learning for two weeks, where the world's data centre capacity sits, a review of 122 studies on holding language models to account, and a proposal to work out which rules apply before a system acts.
Estonia is committing to buy AI compute that no supplier has built yet
Britain used procurement to open its digital market, and 90% of G-Cloud's suppliers are SMEs taking 44% of the money. Estonia is trying the harder version, a forward purchase commitment to attract a supplier that is not there yet.
African developers chose Chinese models before any government signed anything
Ten African countries signed an AI pact with China in Shanghai in July. The adoption it looks like it caused had already happened, in the hands of developers who could download the weights while the American onboarding queue was still running.
China's 29-country AI alliance, and what it is buying
China closed the World AI Conference in Shanghai by launching a 29-country AI alliance. A few weeks earlier, at the G7, Anthropic and Google DeepMind called for an American-led coalition.
Calling it grassroots does not make it grassroots
I find it slightly odd that 'no data center in my backyard' is now routinely described as grassroots activism.
What generative AI does to the open web
Fascinating paper by Alex Chan (NBER, 2026) on what generative AI does to the open web. The web runs on a simple trade: publishers make things worth reading, search sends readers to them, and the visits pay for the work.
The interesting part is the volatility
The interesting part is the volatility. A mix that swings this much in twelve months is a warning to anyone signing a multi-year exclusive deal.
The hard part of AI infrastructure is not the hardware
In two hours I am joining the MCDF workshop on AI Infrastructure to make a case that often gets skipped: the hard part of the Agentic State is not the models, it is the plumbing underneath.
Whose data trains the model, and who benefits from it
As one X user bluntly summarized: 'Claude is winning because rich people are providing the training data. Poor Meta has to train AI with the peasants of the internet.' Crude, and not quite right about the mechanism.
A system-level view of AI, and why it is rare
This is one of the most important system-level AI posts I’ve read in a while. Many public services are not designed to be accessible, they are designed to be survivable: complexity and bad UX function as informal rationing.
A technical milestone for the region, and the harder question underneath
A regional public-AI launch is a real technical achievement, and 'sovereign' is doing a lot of unexamined work in how it is described. Ownership, hosting, control and capability are four different claims.
The inference divide: the inequality no one is talking about
Two people with identical devices, connections and skills, using the same model, can receive fundamentally different intelligence augmentation. One subscription lets the model think for minutes. The other gets seconds.
Context lock-in and the new AI monopolies
The next lock-in may not be the model but the accumulated context: conversations, preferences and work history that cannot be moved. Open protocols for context portability are the remedy, and they are a rare pro-competition rule most sides could accept.
AI's coming data saturation is an opportunity for the countries left out of the corpus
This recent Nature article projecting AI data saturation in the near future inadvertently highlights a significant opportunity for developing economies.
Inclusive AI infrastructure, and who is in the room when it is designed
Still energized from moderating this panel at the Tallinn Digital Summit on inclusive AI infrastructure - born from a growing collaboration between Estonia’s Government and The World Bank Group.