Valdai Club

This report is the fruit of an intellectual collaboration among a group of young authors from Russia and China, brought together by their shared participation in the Valdai Discussion Club—Next Generation programme in 2024–2025. It seeks to offer the most comprehensive picture of artificial intelligence (AI) as a contemporary international phenomenon—simultaneously pervasive and yet not fully understood.

The artificial intelligence (AI) race has no clear winner, but the world is rapidly polarising around two centres of power—the United States and China. The division of states into two "technological blocs" puts regional organisations that previously managed to maintain strategic neutrality in a vulnerable position. Under pressure, they are forced to choose a side (align) or try to maintain a semblance of unity and continue to hedge between the two technological poles.

International competition in the geo-technological sphere is growing, and the nuclear energy is being reborn in a new way and with new tasks: in the coming years, we can expect large projects to integrate nuclear energy and data centres. If such projects are successful, this will not only accelerate the development of artificial intelligence technology, but also affect the landscape of global energy, Maria Bazlutskaya writes.