The Geopolitics of AI

Foreign Policy Live

Foreign Policy

Politics, News Commentary, News

4 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The race is on to dominate the artificial intelligence economy, making the need for safeguards ever more pressing. Jared Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs, joins FP Live to discuss the potential risks and benefits of this growing market—and how so-called geopolitical swing states play an increasingly important role. This conversation was taped earlier this week, before the Trump administration's announcement of the 90-day suspension of reciprocal tariffs. We want to hear from you! Help us shape the future of FP Live by sharing your thoughts on the show by clicking here. Note: This discussion is part of a series of episodes brought to you by the Goldman Sachs Global Institute. Suggested reading (FP links are paywall-free): Jared Cohen: The AI Economy’s Massive Vulnerability Jared Cohen: The Next AI Debate Is About Geopolitics Becca Wasser and Josh Wallin: Build Allied AI, or Risk Fighting Alone Peter Dombrowski and Bruce Jones: A New Era of Undersea Conflict Is Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Ravi Agrual, Foreign Policies Editor-in-Chief.
0:06.3	This is FP Live.
0:10.3	So we've obviously been quite focused on tariffs of late.
0:14.0	If you haven't listened to our tariff debate, take a look.
0:17.5	But we have a second episode for you this week, a bonus episode, and it briefly touches on
0:23.6	tariffs because you have to, but it's mostly about the geopolitics of AI. Now, a lot of discussions
0:30.6	around artificial intelligence are focused on the technology, and that makes sense. But there is a
0:36.5	fascinating geopolitical dimension to this.
0:39.9	And this isn't just about chips. It's about every single thing that goes into powering the
0:45.2	things that make AI what it is. The critical minerals that go into making chips. The data centers
0:51.0	that house those chips. The energy and land and cooling systems that make that data center run,
0:57.7	the sub-sea cables that transport all the information created by these systems,
1:02.2	all of these are what we can now call choke points,
1:06.2	arenas for competition and therefore vulnerabilities,
1:10.3	and therefore an area for big powers to compete and
1:14.4	fight over.
1:15.6	Well, my guest today has done a lot of writing and thinking about this very topic.
1:20.0	He's also coined an interesting term that's relevant here, and that will pop up.
1:24.4	Americans know about swing states in domestic politics. We now talk about
1:29.5	geopolitical swing states, the countries that are valuable chips, pun intended, in the bigger game
1:37.1	between great powers. Well, Jared Cohen is the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs. He's founded Jigsaw, has worked at senior roles at Google,
1:47.5	and also the policy planning team at the State Department.
	...

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