Expand the map: the Global South and the next global economy

Everywhere we look at the moment we seem to be talking about the same things. Who is going to win the US-China trade war? Will AI take over the economy and will the United States dominate it? Can China continue to dominate manufacturing? Has Europe lost its competitiveness?

These are all important questions. We are not going to argue that the United States, China or Europe are suddenly going to become irrelevant. The United States remains an incredible centre for technology, capital and innovation. China has built a manufacturing ecosystem that the rest of the world will struggle to replicate. Europe remains one of the largest and wealthiest markets in the world with world leading industrial companies.

But something is missing from the conversation.

The world isn’t just the United States, China and Europe.

What about India? Southeast Asia? South America? And perhaps most overlooked of all, what about Sub-Saharan Africa?

We keep talking about who is going to become the next dominant economic power as if somebody has to win. Maybe nobody does. Maybe instead we are moving towards a much more multipolar world with several new centres of economic growth.

Maybe we need to expand the map.

Start with the people

Let’s start with something pretty difficult to change: demographics.

By 2050 one in three people aged 15 to 34 globally is expected to be African. More than 600 million additional people are expected to join Sub-Saharan Africa’s working-age population. India meanwhile has around 12 million young people entering its labour market every year.

This is normally presented as a problem. And to be fair it can be. Hundreds of millions of young people without education or employment is obviously not an economic advantage.

But hundreds of millions of educated people with energy, infrastructure and jobs certainly is.

At the same time Europe, China, Japan and several other developed economies are asking increasingly difficult questions about ageing populations and where their future workforce will come from. So maybe we should also ask where the world’s future engineers, technicians, entrepreneurs and consumers are actually going to be.

There is an interesting opportunity here too. Many of the people who will work in 2040 are still in education or haven’t even started their education. Education systems can be increasingly developed around the skills countries expect to need: electrical engineering, AI, automation, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, mineral processing, data centres.

There is a complication though. The industries being built today don’t necessarily employ people in the same way they did fifty years ago. Automation, robotics and AI are already changing how factories operate and how businesses deliver services. A country could attract billions of dollars in industrial investment without creating nearly as many jobs as people might expect. So having a young population isn’t enough. The question is whether those young people will have the skills to participate in these industries, and whether the industries themselves will create opportunities beyond a relatively small number of highly trained workers. After all, an economy can grow without everybody benefiting equally from that growth.

And perhaps we should also think more broadly about the kinds of jobs that industrial development creates. Not everyone needs to become an AI engineer or work in advanced manufacturing. Factories need maintenance technicians, electricians, logistics companies, construction workers, accountants and local suppliers. Industrial growth can create opportunities well beyond the factory itself, but only if countries develop the businesses and skills needed to support it.

This is where the World Energy Council’s idea of Humanising Energy becomes relevant. Energy isn’t really about how many GW we install. It’s about what those GW allow people to actually do: work, study, manufacture, innovate, build businesses and live better lives.

Industry has always followed energy

This is not a completely new thought. Back in 2021, one of us wrote The Sun: Africa’s Key to Prosperity, arguing that Africa’s enormous solar potential could help address one of its biggest barriers to economic development: access to energy.

Five years later, we think the argument can be taken one step further.

What if Africa doesn’t only need energy to enable industry? What if the energy itself becomes one of the reasons industry goes there?

Industry has always followed energy in one way or another. Steel developed around coal and iron. Aluminium smelters have historically located around cheap electricity. Petrochemical industries developed around access to oil and gas.

Now the future energy system increasingly needs to be clean.

Africa has around 60% of the world’s best solar resources but still only a tiny share of installed solar capacity. There is also enormous wind, hydro and geothermal potential. Solar PV is already the cheapest source of electricity in many African countries.

And this isn’t only Africa.

Chile has some of the world’s best solar and wind resources. Brazil has hydro, wind, solar and bioenergy. India is installing renewable energy at enormous scale.

You can’t move the Namibian sun to Germany. You can’t move Kenyan geothermal resources to the United States. Of course electricity can be transmitted, or converted into hydrogen, ammonia and other products and transported. But all of that has a cost.

So instead of always asking how we move the energy to where industry is today, why don’t we also ask which industries could move to where the energy is?

We don’t think this question gets asked enough.

Then add everything else

Energy on its own isn’t enough. Otherwise the Sahara would already be the industrial centre of the world.

But this is where the Global South starts getting interesting because in certain places several factors come together.

Renewable energy. Young people. Competitive labour costs. Minerals. Land. Growing cities. Governments that desperately want economic growth. And eventually very large consumer markets.

In 2024, Africa represented around 18.5% of the world’s population but only around 2% of global manufacturing value added and 1.4% of manufacturing exports.

You can look at that and say Africa clearly hasn’t succeeded in industrialising.

That’s true.

But you can also look at it and see the size of the gap.

Take critical minerals. Africa has enormous resources of cobalt, manganese, platinum group metals, copper, lithium, graphite and others required for the technologies the world says it wants to build.

Why does the economic model have to remain:

Extract the mineral in Africa. Export it. Refine it somewhere else. Manufacture the product somewhere else. Then potentially sell the finished product back to Africa.

Why can’t more of that chain become:

Extract. Process. Manufacture. Recycle.

The same question can be asked in Chile and Argentina with lithium, Indonesia with nickel, Brazil with its enormous natural resources and elsewhere across the Global South.

And perhaps we should also stop thinking about industrialisation only in terms of what these countries can export. Growing populations mean growing demand for housing, transport, food, electricity, healthcare and the materials needed to provide them. Many developing economies already import significant amounts of the products their own populations consume. Cement, fertilisers, processed foods, building materials, machinery and equipment might not sound as exciting as semiconductors or AI data centres. But these are industries that support everyday economic activity.

Why shouldn’t more of those products be manufactured closer to where they are actually needed?

There is an opportunity to develop industries around domestic demand, build local suppliers and eventually compete in export markets. Not every successful industry has to begin with the ambition of selling to Europe or the United States. Sometimes building the capacity to serve domestic and neighbouring markets is a good place to start.

There is also a question of scale. A manufacturer in Ghana shouldn’t necessarily have to rely only on the Ghanaian market. The same goes for a company operating in Senegal, Kenya or Zambia. The African Continental Free Trade Area offers an opportunity to build something much larger, with raw materials, factories, suppliers and consumers connected across borders.

One country might have the minerals, another the energy, another the manufacturing capacity and another a large consumer market. Why shouldn’t those advantages be brought together?

Of course, none of this works simply because governments sign a trade agreement. Goods still need to cross borders. Companies need access to finance. Roads, railways, ports, electricity networks and payment systems need to function. Customs procedures need to become more efficient and businesses need some confidence that the rules won’t change every few months.

But if these connections improve, industries that might struggle to compete within individual national markets could become commercially viable at a regional scale. The World Bank’s 2026 report, Integrating Africa: From Threads to Hubs, makes a similar argument. The next gains from African economic integration may come less from signing additional agreements and more from making existing markets work together.

And this isn’t just an African question. Southeast Asia offers an interesting example of how production can be organised across countries rather than within one national economy. Different parts of a product can be manufactured in different places before being assembled and sold to international markets.

There is no reason every region should follow the same model. But it does raise an important question about whether the next phase of industrialisation in Africa and elsewhere could be driven as much by connecting economies as by developing each country’s resources separately.

This is also where the work of the Africa Sustainable Energy Centre becomes relevant. Sustainable development of natural resources shouldn’t simply mean extracting the same resources with slightly lower emissions. There is a bigger question about how energy and resources can actually create local economic value.

But they don’t have the infrastructure

This is normally where the argument ends.

Africa doesn’t have the infrastructure. It doesn’t have the money. Governance is difficult. Therefore it isn’t going to happen.

Well, maybe. These are real problems.

But we have also seen something interesting happen several times already.

Many African countries didn’t build fixed telephone lines into every home before adopting mobile phones.

They didn’t build a traditional bank branch on every street before people gained access to digital financial services. Kenya’s M-PESA became one of the world’s best examples of mobile money. Sub-Saharan Africa is now the world’s largest mobile money region.

Microfinance did something similar in Bangladesh and elsewhere. It wasn’t perfect and it certainly didn’t eliminate poverty. But it challenged the idea that people had to first become attractive customers for conventional banks before they could access finance.

Energy is starting to do something similar.

Between 2020 and 2022, 55% of new electricity connections in Sub-Saharan Africa came through off-grid solar.

Obviously we shouldn’t get carried away here. You can’t power an aluminium smelter with a solar home system. You can’t operate a major industrial cluster without transmission, roads, ports, water, skills and reliable electricity.

Some infrastructure simply needs to be built.

But perhaps not all of yesterday’s infrastructure needs to be built before tomorrow’s technology can arrive.

That’s the interesting bit.

Africa didn’t need to complete the landline era before entering the mobile era. So what else can be leapfrogged?

Maybe even AI

AI is another funny example because we talk about it as if it exists somewhere in the cloud.

It doesn’t.

Behind AI are enormous physical data centres consuming electricity, using land, cooling systems, water, fibre and a lot of expensive hardware.

And again almost the entire conversation is about the United States and China.

Microsoft and G42 announced a $1 billion digital investment initiative in Kenya in 2024, including plans for a data centre intended to run on geothermal electricity.

But that particular story has also demonstrated why we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. By May 2026, the proposed project had encountered delays. According to reporting at the time, disagreements over government payment guarantees had complicated negotiations, while the project’s scope and electricity requirements were still being discussed. Kenyan officials maintained that the project had not been abandoned.

But actually that makes the example more useful, not less.

The investor interest existed. The renewable resource existed. The opportunity was significant.

The infrastructure and commercial arrangements weren’t ready.

That’s a problem, obviously. But infrastructure can be built and commercial arrangements can be negotiated. The important question is whether countries can create the conditions needed to turn that initial investor interest into projects that actually get built.

And data centres are only one possible example. Green iron and steel, mineral processing, ammonia and fertiliser, aluminium, battery materials and eventually more advanced manufacturing all have different degrees of dependence on cheap reliable energy.

Of course, not every energy-intensive industry will relocate simply because another country has better solar or wind resources. A steel manufacturer will still care about transport costs, access to raw materials, the availability of skilled workers and where its customers are located. A data centre will need much more than electricity. Connectivity, cooling, security, regulation and access to computing equipment are all important.

But surely the location of future industrial investment deserves to be reconsidered when the underlying economics of energy and production are changing.

If the future of energy needs to be clean, then surely at least some future industry will go where clean energy is abundant.

This isn’t all hypothetical

We should also be careful not to discuss the Global South only in the future tense.

India is probably the obvious example that deserves much more attention in these conversations.

It already has world leading IT and pharmaceutical sectors, a huge digital economy, rapidly growing electronics manufacturing and massive renewable energy deployment. Its response to recent geopolitical energy disruptions also shows why it is increasingly strange to discuss global geopolitics purely through a US-China-Europe lens. Major countries like India have their own interests, their own scale and increasingly their own ability to respond.

Morocco is another example. It has built significant automotive and aerospace manufacturing industries around ports, industrial zones, skills and access to European and international markets.

Kenya gave the world M-PESA and has developed an electricity system with significant geothermal generation.

Chile combines copper and lithium with extraordinary renewable resources and an established mining industry.

Brazil has a huge domestic market, substantial manufacturing capability and an electricity system already heavily based on renewable energy.

Vietnam has become a major manufacturing location.

Indonesia is actively trying to capture more value from its nickel resources rather than remaining simply a raw material exporter.

Africa attracted around $70 billion in foreign direct investment in 2025. That was below the approximately $94 billion recorded in 2024, when a small number of exceptionally large transactions boosted the figures. But it was still the continent’s third-highest level of foreign investment since 1990, and around a third above its long-term average.

That is significant. Investment is clearly finding its way into African economies, particularly in sectors such as energy, infrastructure and critical minerals. But attracting capital and translating it into lasting industrial development remain two different things.

None of these places is the same and that is exactly the point.

There is another reason all of this matters now. The geography of global supply chains is already being reconsidered. Trade disputes, geopolitical tensions and disruptions over the past few years have exposed how dependent some industries have become on a relatively small number of countries.

Companies are increasingly having to think about more than where production is cheapest. They are also thinking about supply security, political risk and whether they can afford to depend on one country for essential products.

This doesn’t mean factories are suddenly going to leave China or that decades of industrial development can be replicated overnight. China has spent years developing the suppliers, infrastructure, skills and industrial relationships that make its manufacturing economy so competitive. These things are not easily reproduced.

But even a partial shift in where new investment goes could matter enormously for emerging economies. The question is which countries will be ready to take advantage of it.

The World Trade Organization’s Global Value Chain Development Report 2025 describes how production networks are being reorganised in response to technological change, geopolitical tensions and the search for more resilient supply chains. Globalisation isn’t necessarily disappearing. Some of the connections are simply changing.

And perhaps this is where we need to rethink the direction of globalisation itself.

For decades, much of the development conversation has focused on how emerging economies can attract investment from Europe, the United States or China, and how they can sell more products into those markets.

Those relationships will remain important.

But trade between developing economies is already substantial. According to UNCTAD, South-South merchandise trade reached $7.2 trillion in 2025, accounting for around 28% of global merchandise trade. That is not a small part of the global economy.

So what happens if more of that trade starts creating new industrial relationships?

Indian companies investing in African manufacturing. Brazilian firms developing agricultural technology for African markets. Southeast Asian manufacturers sourcing more materials and components from Latin America. African businesses expanding across regional markets before competing internationally.

These are different kinds of opportunities, but they have something in common. They don’t require the Global South to depend entirely on the industrial and consumer markets of today’s largest economies.

And there is another opportunity here. Different countries have developed capabilities that others could learn from or build upon. India has significant experience in pharmaceuticals, digital services and engineering. Brazil has developed agricultural technologies and industrial capabilities suited to a large domestic market. Southeast Asian economies have gained experience integrating into international manufacturing supply chains.

There is no reason these experiences need to remain confined to the countries where they developed. Technology partnerships, investments, trade and the movement of skills could create new opportunities between emerging economies.

Of course, South-South cooperation isn’t automatically beneficial simply because the countries involved are developing economies. Trade can still be unequal. Investment can still be concentrated in extracting resources. One country can still capture most of the value while another supplies the raw materials.

But that is precisely why the nature of these economic relationships matters.

A multipolar economy doesn’t mean creating another China somewhere else.

There might not be a next China.

There might be many different centres doing different things.

A mineral deposit isn’t an industrial strategy

Still, let’s not pretend this happens because we wrote an optimistic article about it.

Africa has always had sun.

It has had minerals for a very long time.

A mineral deposit isn’t an industrial strategy. Sunshine isn’t an electricity system. Available land isn’t an industrial zone. A young population isn’t a skilled workforce. An announcement isn’t an investment.

And not every country needs to be trying to build the same industries.

There is a tendency for industrial ambitions to follow whatever happens to be attracting global attention. Today it might be electric vehicles, battery manufacturing, hydrogen or AI data centres. These are all important industries, but that doesn’t mean every country has the conditions to compete in them.

Some countries may be better placed to build food processing industries, manufacture construction materials or expand their agricultural value chains. Others may have the energy resources, minerals, skills and infrastructure to support more advanced manufacturing.

There is nothing particularly wrong with starting with less glamorous industries if they can create jobs, develop suppliers and build capabilities that support more complex production later.

And this is where governments have an important role to play. Industrial policy isn’t simply about announcing that a country wants to become a manufacturing hub. There needs to be some understanding of which industries can realistically succeed, what prevents them from growing and what public investment or policy changes might help.

That might mean building transmission infrastructure around industrial zones, investing in technical education, improving access to finance or making it easier for businesses to import machinery and export finished products.

It might also mean recognising when an industry simply isn’t competitive and directing resources elsewhere. Countries cannot subsidise their way into every industry indefinitely.

The cost of capital remains incredibly important. So do political stability, currency risk, governance, grid reliability, logistics, education, access to finance and bureaucracy.

There is an uncomfortable reality here too. Having some of the world’s best energy resources doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the world’s cheapest energy.

In its 2023 assessment, the International Energy Agency found that the cost of capital for utility-scale clean energy generation projects in Africa was at least two to three times higher than in advanced economies and China. That matters because projects like solar farms, transmission networks and industrial facilities often require enormous amounts of money before they generate any revenue.

Two countries could have similar solar resources but face very different project costs simply because investors and lenders price the risks differently.

So even when the underlying technology is commercially attractive, the financing can make the project difficult to justify.

And these financing challenges go beyond energy.

A manufacturer considering a new factory will look at the cost of borrowing, exchange rate risk, access to foreign currency, the reliability of its customers and whether it can recover its investment over time.

Governments may want more infrastructure, but many are already dealing with competing spending priorities and debt obligations.

Development finance institutions and multilateral lenders can help, particularly where private investors are unwilling to take certain risks alone. Guarantees, concessional finance and partnerships between public and private investors can make some projects possible that might otherwise struggle to secure funding.

But the objective should also be to create conditions in which more projects can attract long-term commercial investment without depending indefinitely on public support.

This raises a bigger question about the international financial system. If the countries with some of the greatest needs for new energy and infrastructure also face some of the highest financing costs, how quickly can they realistically industrialise?

Improving domestic institutions and regulation is part of the answer. But so is finding better ways to mobilise international and domestic savings, manage currency risks and finance projects whose economic benefits may take many years to materialise.

The availability of capital, and the terms on which countries can access it, could be just as important in shaping the next global economy as the availability of natural resources.

And even after financing has been secured, the question of implementation remains. Governments announce industrial parks, transport corridors and energy projects all the time. Some are completed and become commercially successful. Others are delayed for years or never progress beyond the planning stage.

The difference often comes down to the less exciting parts of development: procurement, project preparation, land acquisition, regulatory approvals, maintenance and the ability of institutions to deliver what has been promised.

These things don’t attract the same attention as a billion-dollar investment announcement. But without them, the announcement doesn’t mean much.

More than 560 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity.

And even electricity access isn’t enough.

Electricity needs to be reliable. It needs to be affordable. And increasingly it needs to be environmentally sustainable.

This is essentially the World Energy Council’s Energy Trilemma: Energy Security, Energy Equity and Environmental Sustainability.

Cheap solar doesn’t help an industrial company much if the grid goes down every day. Reliable electricity doesn’t enable prosperity if people and businesses can’t afford it. And economic development that destroys the natural systems people depend upon eventually creates another set of problems.

There is no shortcut around all of this.

But there is something interesting about the list of disadvantages.

• You can build a grid.
• You can build a port.
• You can train engineers.
• You can improve regulation.
• You can build universities.
• You can build an industrial zone.
• You can build a railway.

None of those are easy. Some take decades. Some countries have been trying to solve these problems for decades already.

But they are buildable.

It is considerably harder to manufacture solar irradiation, create a lithium deposit or suddenly produce hundreds of millions of young workers in an ageing economy.

And climate change doesn’t wait for development

There is another complication.

Many Global South countries need to build enormous amounts of infrastructure whilst simultaneously dealing with some of the worst consequences of climate change.

Extreme heat. Floods. Drought. Water stress. Food insecurity.

Many of these countries contributed relatively little to the historic emissions causing the problem, but that doesn’t make the physical consequences disappear.

So copying the development pathway of Europe or the United States from 50 or 100 years ago isn’t even necessarily sensible anymore.

• Why build inefficient buildings now and retrofit them later?
• Why build new industrial facilities without considering water reuse where water is already scarce?
• Why build cities today that will need expensive adaptation to heat and flooding in 20 years?
• Why build an electricity system entirely dependent on imported fuels when competitive domestic renewable resources are available?
• Why create linear manufacturing systems when access to some raw materials is becoming increasingly strategic?

Maybe starting later can sometimes mean starting newer.

Not always. Having no infrastructure is still normally worse than having infrastructure. We shouldn’t somehow turn poverty or an infrastructure deficit into an advantage. It isn’t.

But if trillions need to be invested anyway, there is at least an opportunity to build for the economy and climate that are coming rather than recreate the one that already existed somewhere else.

So who is the development actually for?

This is maybe the most important part.

The conclusion from all of this shouldn’t be that Africa has lots of sunshine, land, minerals and young people, therefore foreign companies should move there to access cheap resources.

We’ve done versions of that before.

The Global South shouldn’t simply provide the raw materials, energy and labour for somebody else’s next economy.

The opportunity is more local value creation.

More processing. More manufacturing. More local suppliers. More skills. More infrastructure. More businesses. More tax revenues. Eventually more globally competitive companies originating from these countries themselves.

There is also the question of who will actually own the industries being developed.

Foreign investment can bring capital, technology, expertise and access to markets that local businesses might otherwise struggle to reach. That matters. But if the next generation of factories, energy projects and digital infrastructure is built across the Global South, how much of the economic value will remain in those economies?

Will local companies develop the skills and financial capacity to build and operate these assets themselves? Will they become suppliers to international businesses, or eventually grow into international businesses in their own right?

These questions matter because hosting an industry and developing the capabilities to compete within that industry are not necessarily the same thing.

And there is no reason this has to be presented as a choice between foreign and local investment. Many successful industries have developed through partnerships, joint ventures, supplier relationships and the gradual transfer of knowledge and capabilities.

The important question is what remains after the initial investment has been made.

Are there more skilled workers? More competitive local businesses? Better infrastructure? Stronger institutions? A bigger domestic tax base?

If the answer is yes, then the benefits can extend well beyond the original project.

There is another side to this too. Developing countries shouldn’t have to wait until they become major manufacturing centres before their populations begin benefiting from economic growth. Improving electricity access, transport, education, healthcare and opportunities for small businesses matters just as much.

A new factory can be valuable. But so can reliable electricity that allows thousands of smaller businesses to operate, or a road that helps farmers reach markets, or a digital payment system that makes it easier for people to participate in the economy.

And more people gaining access to the energy in the first place.

This is where Humanising Energy comes back into the story.

The purpose isn’t the solar panel.

The purpose is what people can do once the energy exists.

Expand the map

The United States doesn’t need to fail for Africa to succeed.

China doesn’t need to stop manufacturing for India to manufacture more.

Europe doesn’t need to become irrelevant for Latin America to capture more value from its resources.

These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Perhaps this is something we need to think about differently. We often discuss economic competition as though growth in one part of the world must come at the expense of another. But the next phase of globalisation could also create opportunities for more countries to participate in industries and markets that have historically been concentrated in relatively few places.

A factory opening in Vietnam doesn’t necessarily mean a factory somewhere else has to close. An African country processing more of its own minerals doesn’t mean existing industrial economies suddenly become irrelevant.

And there is no reason every country should be pursuing the same opportunities. For some, the next big step might be developing data centres or producing green steel. For others, it could be expanding food processing, manufacturing construction materials or making better use of their agricultural resources.

Some will develop industries serving global markets. Others will begin by meeting demand closer to home. Both matter.

The world needs more electricity, more compute, more minerals, more infrastructure, more manufacturing and more skilled people. And increasingly the additional energy supporting all of that needs to be clean.

A lot of the people, renewable resources, raw materials and space required for this next phase of growth are outside the three economic centres we spend most of our time talking about.

But perhaps the more important question is what happens when those resources begin attracting serious investment.

Does a new industrial facility create opportunities for local suppliers? Does a new electricity project support businesses and households as well as the factory it was built to serve? Do transport corridors connect neighbouring economies, or simply move raw materials towards ports? Do countries develop the skills and businesses needed to participate in these industries themselves?

These are the things that will determine whether the next phase of global economic growth genuinely changes the lives of people in the countries where it takes place.

And there is a role for everyone in this. Governments need to create the conditions for investment and industrial development. Businesses need to identify opportunities that make commercial sense. Financial institutions need to find ways to support projects that are viable but struggle to attract affordable capital. Universities and training institutions need to prepare people for the industries that are emerging.

And countries across the Global South have an opportunity to work more closely with one another, rather than looking only towards the same established economic centres for investment, technology and markets.

None of this means success is guaranteed. Quite the opposite. Turning potential into prosperity is probably the hardest part.

Africa has had enormous energy and mineral resources for generations. Latin America has long supplied the world with commodities. Asia’s industrial development has taken decades of investment, policy choices and learning.

There is nothing automatic about any of these processes. Countries will make mistakes. Some investments will fail. Some opportunities will turn out to be less attractive than they initially appeared.

But the industrial geography of the world has changed before. There is no reason to assume it will stop changing now.

And perhaps that is the point. A more multipolar global economy doesn’t need to mean replacing one dominant economic power with another. It could mean more countries developing their own industrial capabilities, more trade taking place between emerging economies and more people participating in the industries that will shape the coming decades.

It could also mean a world in which access to energy, technology, capital and manufacturing capacity is less concentrated than it is today. Where countries are not simply competing to supply raw materials to existing industrial powers, but are increasingly able to determine what they produce, what they consume and where they invest.

That would be a significant change.

Not because the United States, China or Europe would become less important, but because many more countries would become important in their own right.

But when we talk about who will build AI, where the next factories will be, where energy will come from and which economies will grow over the coming decades, maybe we should stop assuming tomorrow’s industries will all be built where yesterday’s industries already are.

The world isn’t just the United States, China and Europe.

Expand the map.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

The world needs sustainability knowledge. At illuminem, no interest group or shareholder can influence our work. Thank you for supporting our mission to make high-quality and independent sustainability information free for all. Every contribution helps. Thank you for donating today.