Behind the bar in a Dublin pub, a barman from Taiwan runs the only chips fryer in town that can do the good chips.
On the menu is the entire AI industry. Each, it turns out, orders only one thing.
Washington goes first. Bourbon on the rocks, a bowl of the good chips (his recipe, the barman’s fryer) and an offer to invest in the bar. The barman points out it isn’t a startup. Washington invests anyway.
Beijing orders baijiu, delivered by a robot that learned the job at a state-funded training centre. The robot is for sale. If you’d rather build your own, the magnets in its arms need rare metals that Beijing refines almost single-handedly. So, ask nicely.
New Delhi orders chai and offers to keep everyone’s servers in his back room. Foreign firms that park servers there get a tax holiday until 2047. The locals get tap water, while stocks last.
Moscow takes the seat facing the room. Vodka, from his own bottle, which never leaves the building. He has a list of things that may not be said at this table, and he’ll be watching it. He’d like some chips too, but he isn’t allowed near the fryer. He’s asked Beijing to share hers. There’s a queue.
The waitress asks who’s paying, while the lights flicker. In Ireland, data centres now take nearly a quarter of the country’s electricity. Four pockets are patted. Four wallets are, regrettably, elsewhere. She knows where unpaid tabs end up: on someone who never ordered.
Not a race, a carve-up
I used to work as a gardener. The roses sulked one summer, the aphids ran amok the next, but the water bill never missed a month. Twenty years in communications taught me the same lesson in a smarter outfit: every big announcement is a ribbon-cutting with the invoice hidden under the red carpet.
This isn’t actually a race to build the best AI. The top American and Chinese models are just 2.7% apart, a photo finish. It’s a carve-up, like a Sunday roast. Four countries, four slices: money, factories, server space and the rulebook. Everyone gets a plate. Nobody volunteers to wash up.
Washington brings the cheque book
America has the deepest pockets in the room: $285.9 billion of private AI investment in 2025, 23 times China’s, though Chinese state money sits outside that number. The catch is TSMC, the Taiwanese firm that physically makes the chips Nvidia designs. It takes 72.5% of the biggest contract chipmakers’ revenue. Washington owns the recipe. Taiwan owns the fryer.
Beijing brings the shop floor
China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, 59% of the world’s total and more than nine times America’s.
The catch is the magnets: robot motors need rare-earth metals, and Beijing dominates those. Reuters reported in May that heavy rare-earth exports were still down about half since China’s controls began. Finished robots: aisle five, plenty in stock. Rare earths: behind the counter, and the assistant has just popped out.
New Delhi brings the spare room
India’s slice is room, with a tax break. The Finance Act 2026 gives notified foreign companies a tax exemption on data-centre services until March 2047, provided an Indian company owns and runs the centre.
The bill is water. Indian data centres use an estimated 150 billion litres a year, and Maharashtra has just declared drought across 74% of its talukas (counties, roughly). India has no binding national data-centre policy, so the minister’s promise that data centres will recycle wastewater, with drinking water for staff only lasts as long as the next dry season. The locals share their drought with some very thirsty neighbours.
Moscow brings the padlock
Sanctions mean Russia can’t win on chips, cash or factories. What Mother Russia can produce by decree is a rulebook. Russia’s first AI law took effect on 1 September. Models wearing the “sovereign” or “national” badge must keep answers and data in Russia-owned data centres inside Russia and obey its speech restrictions. The government may also designate uses where only badge-holders are allowed. Think of a bouncer who only lets you in once you’ve agreed the club is lovely and the owner is a genius—then walks you home. Every night.
Control matters as much as the other three: it decides who may use AI, where your data lives and what an answer is allowed to say. Moscow wrote the rulebook but still queues for the chips: Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, hopes to run its GigaChat chatbot on Chinese chips, behind ByteDance (TikTok), Tencent (WeChat) and Alibaba (online shopping).
Everyone else, squeezing in
The bar has only four chairs, but no limit on standing room. The whole planet is jumping on the bandwagon, crammed into the bar with a business plan in each hand. MTN plans 150 MW of AI data centres in Nigeria and South Africa. Brazil’s ReData law hands out tax breaks with homework: clean power, low water. Australia has 66.9 GW of connection requests, a queue that would make a Friday-night kebab shop blush. Britain has AI Growth Zones, which sounds like a garden centre. Brussels takes gigafactory applications, naturally in triplicate. It’s getting warm in here. The air conditioning has started to make a noise.
The IEA, the world’s energy watchdog, sees data-centre electricity use more than doubling by 2030. The bill comes in three currencies. Households pay in electricity, communities in water, and anyone whose chatbot follows somebody else’s rulebook pays in what they’re allowed to ask. The four at the table are still looking for their wallets.
Over to the regulars
Feeling guilty about your own prompts is like apologising for using a watering can while the golf course runs its sprinklers at noon. Your real clout is elsewhere, because the table needs three things from ordinary people: someone to let them build, someone to switch the thing on and someone to write the rules. That’s a neighbour, an employee and a voter. All three turn out to be you.
At the planning desk. Somewhere near you, a data-centre application has a comment box nobody uses. Be the nobody. Search your council’s planning site for “data centre” and ask who pays for the grid connection, how much water it will use and how many permanent jobs it creates.
At work. When a shiny AI tool lands on your team, read my May post. Would you still use it if you didn’t have to? Less? Who is allowed to say “no thanks, I’ll do this bit myself”?
Write to your representative. The European Commission has proposed a mandatory energy and water rating for data centres above 500 kW, like the energy label on a fridge, except this fridge drinks a lake. Objections close about 21 November. EU readers, tell your MEP to back it. Elsewhere, ask if anything similar exists.
Star Trek gave us the replicator and never once showed the power bill. The waitress asked who’s paying and nobody answered. In the future, presumably, somebody else is paying. When I was a contractor, this is how it worked: when nobody’s name is on the quote, the invoice goes to whoever answers the door. Knock, knock.