There is a detail that many people ignore when they see military robots, autonomous drones or intelligent defense systems, none of that works without a brain and in the 21st century that brain is no longer human, it is made of silicon, for swarms of drones to decide routes so that robberies can react in milliseconds, for military systems to interpret thousands of data at the same time, something more valuable than oil or gold is needed, processing power.
At the center of this dispute, a company has become a critical piece of the global NVidia board, its advanced chips, such as the GB200 Grace Blackwell lines, represent the basic infrastructure of cutting-edge artificial intelligence. They are the ones that train models capable of recognizing patterns, predicting threats, controlling machines and operating complex systems in real time. Without that hardware, training a modern military AI would be like competing in a Formula 1 race pushing a wooden cart. China.
The objective is direct, to delay the Chinese advance in strategic artificial intelligence, because whoever masters cutting-edge chips does not just master computers, he masters scientific speed, industrial innovation and military advantage, but Beijing did not stand still, because China invests billions to create its own semiconductor chain seeking complete technological independence. The message is clear, no superpower wants to depend on its rival to power its machines.
We are seeing the birth of a kind of digital Berlin Wall, on one side, the Western technological ecosystem, on the other Chinese effort to build a parallel structure resistant to sanctions and blockades and the next frontier has already appeared, it is called Edge Computing, instead of depending on large distant data centers, the processing begins to occur within the machine itself. In other words, tiny chips installed in drones, drones or vehicles capable of executing billions of operations per second without the need for the cloud.
That changes everything because a connected robot can be delayed, a robot that thinks locally reacts instantly, on the battlefield, milliseconds can be worth more than armor, in the past, wars were won with steel, fuel and soldiers, now they begin to depend on lithography, transistors and algorithms.
