// geopolitical competition

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May 16

Russia Joins US and China in the Race for Geostationary Orbit

The geosynchronous orbit band—a finite real estate zone 22,000 miles above the equator—has become a flashpoint for great power competition as Russia deploys reconnaissance satellites alongside existing US and Chinese capabilities. Control of GEO matters because it's where communications, weather, and early-warning systems live; unlike low-Earth orbit, these slots don't move relative to ground stations, making them strategically asymmetric assets. Russia's entry means orbital surveillance is no longer a two-player game, and spectrum and slot scarcity will force explicit negotiation among powers that prefer plausible deniability.

theme-ai compute infrastructure ai capability constraints geopolitical competition

May 12

Compute Shortages, Not Talent, Bottleneck Chinese AI

Source: Understandingai

U.S. export controls on advanced chips constrain Chinese AI development—not because China lacks talent or capital, but because the hardware pipeline is throttled. This shifts competition away from pure research capability toward whoever extracts the most performance from available silicon, favoring companies with better optimization practices and access to legacy chip architectures. American export policy has become the primary lever of competitive advantage, though it also incentivizes China to accelerate domestic chip manufacturing and push Chinese AI labs toward algorithmic approaches that work within hardware constraints.