Jorge F. Negrete P.
The digital frontier is not heading towards the sky, but towards the tiny. JFN.
China, every time it moves, has to look back at its 3,500 years of history. The United States was born looking to the future. Today, Europe looks to China and the United States.
The USA, in its short history, has fought the most important technological battles in our contemporary society. The most important? The battle of the chips, the processors.
The power of this industry baptized a geographic and economic region of the United States: Sillicon Valley, and was born under success, first military after the Vietnam War, and later with the consumer electronics market. They have faced Asia twice. First against the Japanese in the late eighties and mid-nineties, with the powerful electronics industry of Fuji, Cannon and Sony, and now against China.
On both occasions, a processor law from Congress was vital. Every digital product has a processor or chip, as its heart. Electronics, consumer goods, cars, airplanes, computers, ships, military weapons, radars, smartphones and the aerospace industry. The security of the United States, the West and the world depends on chips.
Processors are the basis of computing and supercomputing. Telecommunications networks have a single purpose, to release massive amounts of data and computing processes. Chips and networks have never been so close together.
Artificial Intelligence is agnostic and the natural daughter of processors and telecommunications networks. There is no Artificial Intelligence or robust telecommunications networks without chips.
For decades, transistors, spliced to large electronic boards, were concentrated by the hundreds and thousands inside floors and computer rooms. Today, the new generation of chips can place more than 290 million transistors per square millimeter, and Intel aims to manufacture chips with one million million transistors by 2030. We are talking about 3NM (nano millimeters) processors. Science fiction via deep ultraviolet lithography.
Intel aims for Artificial Intelligence everywhere, which reaches the cloud, the laptop, edge computing (I call it neighborhood data centers) and mobile devices. This already unleashes the largest and most dizzying race for the control of Artificial Intelligence via the design of computing processors, called neuromorphic, resembling human neuronal capacity.
President Biden added massive amounts of radio spectrum to the equation. Intel envisions a silicon economy, already worth $600 billion and contributing $1 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
The axiom is: telecommunications networks + neuromorphic chips + spectrum = computing capacity = Artificial Intelligence.
Greece is the basis of the West with its philosophy, its reflection on politics and its mythological and literary fiction, Rome, under the premise of its civilizational and legal expansion; the Middle Ages rescuing Rome and Greece in monasteries; and the Renaissance, with its creative explosion, the basis of contemporary Western aesthetics. Thousands of years giving marrow to the cultural body of the West may pale with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence. The West and the entire world will not be the same.
In this digital renaissance, Latin America and Mexico are in the best capacity to conquer a privileged place in the territory of economic, cultural, scientific and technological development. The value chain of processors needs to increase value and we are indispensable. Mexico designs chips and processors, the United States manufactures, Costa Rica assembles and distributes.
In global geopolitics, manufacturing processors is preparing a generation of engineers, consultants, analysts, companies, and transversal economic activities, vital for the 21st century, above any other economy.
Are we ready for the Digital Renaissance?