Today’s headlines are suspiciously similar to those of other turmoils throughout the last century. While not every war has been fought over oil, a great many have. Conflicts in the Middle East have deep roots, and are much more complex than simply oil. That said, the desire for cheap, plentiful oil has been a driving force in many military acts.
Countries survive and thrive because of their supply lines. If another country has what you need, the best case scenario is a mutually beneficial trade agreement. When those fall apart and tensions rise, countries have shown the willingness to step in with military force. Some of this is to stop harmful regimes, some is to prevent threats from growing, and there are a thousand other reasons that can be used as well. Sidestepping the minefield of discussing true motivations in this century of conflict, it is clear that when a powerful country’s supply line is threatened, it will consider this threat a matter of national security, and will act accordingly.
Today’s headlines could be the same as those of the Gulf War, or certain conflicts in South America in the mid-late 20th century. However, the underlying drive to ensure oil—and really energy—keeps flowing is so much bigger than any conflict before. All of the same needs for energy still exist: manufacturing, communities, transportation, defense, etc. These alone are enough to drive “oil-adjacent” conflict. But there is a new driving force that is energy-hungry as well, and we are seeing an arms race unlike anything in history for it.
The Race for AGI
There is an active grab for global resources today, driven primarily by the US, China, and Russia, though each of these countries has a group of supporting nations that benefit. Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine are all complicated geopolitical messes, but each has a common theme: resources that are critical to energy. In addition to the vast amounts of energy already needed, the AI industry has become a very, very, energy hungry player. By 2030-2035, AI could account for 20% of global electricity use. Even now, grids are straining under the added load of data centers, and this strain is expected to continue rising sharply. Elon Musk’s xAI has made headlines by its decision to supplement its energy needs by running entire clusters of old jet engine turbines so that its data centers can power the training and inference demands. The environmental impact of this has been heavily contested and is possibly illegal, but it is being done all the same in order to power AI and move it forward.
The race for AI is well under way, with technology already transforming entire industries. However, the true race is for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which could give whoever wields it an asymmetric advantage we haven’t seen since the invention of the nuclear bomb.
Because of the stakes for AGI’s winner, and because a handful of major tech companies are spending billions toward AI dominance, we are beginning to see an interesting—and troubling—trend. Top companies are solidifying more and more partnerships directly with government entities. For China this is the default, but in the US, the government (including the military) are establishing massive contracts with AI companies. If we look into the near future, we see an inevitable result: countries competing for AGI supremacy, folding in the tech companies driving innovation, and using military force when supply lines (oil, advanced chips, rare earth elements, etc.) are threatened. It’s a bleak future, but the result isn’t great either. One or more governments, not the people within those countries, will have control of AGI.
There has to be a better way for this to end.
The Promise of Decentralized AGI
Despite all the doom and gloom, there is hope for the actual people of the world. With major tech, industry, infrastructure, and defense, governments have often been the only organizations large enough to build and manage these massive undertakings. For AI, there are some critical trends happening that could make the arms race for AGI different from anything we’ve seen. For one thing, there is continuous progress being made toward building more efficient AI models. And for another, blockchain technology has been maturing the idea of decentralized coordination of systems and has demonstrated this in a number of key areas. This has enabled decentralized computing power and other digital infrastructure elements that span across borders, eliminate the need for centralized choke points, and are incredibly resilient to standard cyber attacks. Can this work for AI as well? There are a few cases that have shown progress here, most notably with SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance. This coalition has developed decentralized infrastructure that is designed for AGI architecture (including their Hyperon framework), enabling compute power from ordinary machines around the globe. Scalability and the more efficient use of resources aside, this type of open and borderless approach is incredibly democratic, giving people as a whole access to this technology.
What Would AGI-for-all Mean?
From a geopolitical standpoint, a decentralized AGI with open access takes away the driving forces behind the AI arms race. While it wouldn’t disappear, it would eliminate the possibility of asymmetrical leverage, and the hundreds of billions spent by governments would start to look excessive and wasteful. As a parallel, the internet has managed to stay decentralized despite the efforts of governments to control it. Even in areas where the internet is heavily restricted, simple tools like a VPN can thwart censorship. If a major power were to invest a trillion dollars to replicate the internet for its own purposes, the people would almost certainly revolt.
There are more benefits to this path, even for the governments who don’t gain a controlling hand on AGI. As mentioned above, the electrical grid is showing more examples of straining and even breaking, and this is without the projected demand spikes from now until 2035. Data centers create electrical demand hotspots, and the grid simply wasn’t designed for that. From a supply line perspective, the raw materials needed for advanced processing are also strained at the global level. Rare earth elements are a growing bottleneck, as are AI-capable chips. Decentralized infrastructure solves both these problems, distributing the electrical load across the globe, while implementing many of the processors already in use today. A distributed workload across millions of devices means that the individual device doesn’t need to be overly power hungry or high performance. All of this, and the result is less damage to the environment as a bonus.
"If the compute needed for AGI-level intelligence can be provided by distributed infrastructure rather than centralized mega-facilities, energy is no longer the master variable of the AI contest."
— SingularityNET (@SingularityNET) March 6, 2026
CEO Dr. @bengoertzel discusses the intersection of the AGI race and global energy… pic.twitter.com/h2beQGKKnQ
Final Thoughts
The race for AGI is on, and nothing can stop it. What we can do, however, is decide how that race should be run. If a few mega corporations and governments gain control of a technology that will literally change the world, we have some dark days in the battles leading up to that supremacy, and likely some dark days after a winner is declared. Decentralized AGI is a much, much different story, aligning with the people around the globe. We need to think about which future we want, and act on it—now.
Featured image by Yngvi Hegemony on Unsplash
