At the beginning of July, the Foreign Ministry Collegium held a regular meeting; however, the topic was anything but routine. The discussion focused on information and communication technologies, specifically the new challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Though the results were summarised in an official news release, the meeting was merely the first step in a far broader effort. It marked the launch of a substantive intra-ministry debate and the ministry’s adaptation to addressing AI-related challenges within the international dimension of this vast topic.

Neocolon-AI-lism

by Maria Zakharova, Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman

New dependency mechanisms

In the context of this discussion for a wider audience, I would like to delve deeper into the political backdrop of digital transformation and the role that neural network technologies are poised to play in it. Undoubtedly, as a key driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has been shaping a new economic, socio-cultural, and political system right before our eyes. These changes are particularly evident in the industrial, financial, and economic spheres across nations – yet the explosive development of machine learning is increasingly acquiring a political dimension. To establish the appropriate semantic framework for this “underside” of digitalisation, we must first outline the ideological coordinates adopted by certain geopolitical players advancing artificial intelligence.
  That framework is neo-colonialist thinking.
  When combined with AI, neo-colonialism takes on a truly global, technologically sophisticated dimension. Beyond the traditional dominance of the so-called “golden billion,” the rest of the world now faces novel mechanisms of dependency – more subtle than classical colonial subjugation, yet far more pervasive and enduring. Developing nations are no longer merely reliant on imported hardware or software; they are increasingly subjected to algorithmic governance, which dictates critical processes – from logistics to education, from healthcare to the shaping of public opinion. This represents a higher-order resource dependency, where influence is exported through information control, data supremacy, and access to computational power.

Who can and wants to dictate the terms?

This governance is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select agglomeration of powerful states and corporations – entities that have monopolised cutting-edge technologies and their supporting infrastructure. Control over such resources translates into the power to dictate terms, impose behavioural models, reshape worldviews and manipulate collective consciousness. Ultimately, it enables influence over decision-making – not just at the governmental level, but on individual citizens – operating “at the moment,” executing this influence in real time.
  AI technologies now enable the direction or outright substitution of reality at previously unimaginable scales. This influence operates through both traditional information channels and the digital environment – which permeates, unnoticed, every facet of daily life. Most disturbingly, neural network manipulations bypass logical reasoning and factual arguments entirely, instead targeting our automatic reflexes, moral and ethical convictions, and even the subconscious itself.
  A radically new architecture of control is emerging – one that embeds external influence directly into the psychological fabric of human decision-making, circumventing conscious choice and resistance altogether.
  Therefore, AI is not only and not so much becoming an instrument of progress as a form of pressure and a driving force of global competition, including for people’s hearts and souls and their way of life, as well as a means of redistributing power in the world. The pursuit of this undivided leadership and the status of the rule of humankind’s destiny might create a future that is completely different from what the advocates of digital transition promise. This issue calls for a thorough analysis that will take into account both high-tech progress and economic realities, including their environmental aspects.

New visionary project of a global Deep State

According to a brief published in July, PJM Interconnection, America’s largest power grid, it is under strain as data centres and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built. Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20 per cent this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection’s territory, which covers 13 states – from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey – serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centres in the world. In light of the West’s centuries-long colonial habits, it is clear that the bulk of pressure on the systems that produce natural resources, electricity and other benefits needed to feed AI’s greed will be shouldered by the developing countries that imprudently believe the West’s promises of helping them “bridge the digital divide.” The British used to say that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” which was serviced by its numerous colonies. The well-being of France was largely based on the enslaved Francophone countries. During the dark age in their history, Germans were building a Thousand-Year Reich. Artificial Intelligence is a new visionary project of the global Deep State.
  Let us take a closer look at the nascent global locus of control based on facts and figures.

Creeping digitalisation of all areas of economic activity

Its first element is the global economy, which is implementing a controlled digital transition, that is, a creeping digitalisation of all spheres of economic activity, including production, management, logistics, distribution, and so on. The OECD or so-called industrialised countries have created conditions under which the digital sector has become the fastest growing sector in the past six or seven years. It currently accounts for 3 per cent of global GDP. No other sector in history developed as quickly and on such a scale as digitalisation.
  Digital standards are becoming the necessary condition for investment and attract up to 13 per cent of foreign investment, and this amount keeps growing more rapidly. Humanity is generating a vast amount of information, more per week than it generated over the previous thousand years. Therefore, big data processing is the key development trend now. Businesses admit and are aware of this. The implementation of new technologies increases their productivity by 5-6 per cent.
  Another element of this mechanism is AI itself and its ever-growing influence on the global economy. According to the European Commission, two out of five companies in the EU countries are using AI, and the speed of AI proliferation has doubled in 2024 compared to 2023. Analysts assess the AI technology market in the United States at about 75 billion USD this year. It has grown by over 30 per cent year-on-year and continues to grow. AI technologies have taken over all households whose members use modern smartphones. AI is now integrated into nearly all smartphones using modern operating systems, that is, into the smartphones of every man, woman and child in the world.
  Allocations for AI development are the best proof of the attention given to it. The United States has announced the allocation of 500 billion USD for the Stargate project focused on building AI infrastructure. Despite a gloomy economic outlook, the EU plans to spend €200 billion on InvestAI. Britain will invest £14 billion in the data centre sector alone. According to experts, China’s spending on AI over the past year (since 2024) could grow by 48 per cent to 84-98 billion USD.
  Such exponential growth and digital transformation are inconceivable without exerting a direct impact on the systems underpinning the supply of resources and energy to the relevant infrastructure.

Rare earths and the battle for economic redistribution

The principal resource required to sustain the expansion of production and the increasingly pervasive application of artificial intelligence standards is rare-earth metals – fossil elements with critically limited reserves. These very materials now lie at the heart of the trade wars between the principal suppliers of AI solutions on the global market. The political elites of Western nations – the majority of which lack domestic deposits of such substances – seek to secure unrestricted access to extraction sites located in the states comprising the World Majority. In pursuit of this goal, they resort to aggressive neo-colonial policies, which at times verge upon outright pillage and plundering.
  According to estimates from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research(UNITAR), the extraction of minerals necessary for AI systems has evolved into a struggle over a global economic repartition of planetary scale. The production of a single 100-gram smartphone requires approximately 70 kilogrammes of raw materials – extracted predominantly in Third World countries. Smartphones are manufactured in billions. As deposits of these indispensable elements and minerals are largely located in developing countries, Western manufacturers exploit not only their subsoil, but also their labour force. Experts now speak of a phenomenon termed “mineral colonialism.”
  The extraction of minerals critical for the digital transformation – including graphite, lithium, and cobalt – is projected to increase by 500 per cent by the year 2050, thereby exacerbating the already unequal distribution of environmental burdens and economic benefits. The countries of the so-called “collective West” will continue to drain resources from the developing world, whilst the states of the Global South are consigned to further impoverishment through digital inequality.

Huge costs for energy and water

If this trend holds true with respect to resources, it is all the more relevant in relation to the energy and water costs incurred by cooling computational infrastructure. According to UNCTAD’s own figures, electricity consumption by the thirteen largest data processing centre operators more than doubled between 2018 and 2022. In 2022 alone, data centres across the world consumed as much energy as the entire France – some 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) – and this figure is expected to double again within just the next three years. Meanwhile, the American corporation Google consumed more than 21 million cubic metres of potable water in 2022 solely to cool its servers. Microsoft, for its part, utilised 700,000 litres of clean drinking water to train its generative AI model, GPT-3. Let us recall that, according to United Nations estimates, two billion people across the globe lack stable access to clean drinking water. From the perspective of the West, it would appear that water is better spent on artificial intelligence than on the natural kind.

The ‘collective West’ still wants to set the standards

Yet another component of the nascent neo-colonial order has emerged in the form of the environmental and ideological platform, which neoliberal forces within the countries of the so-called “collective West “continue to promote. For themselves, they have engineered a universal system of economic permissiveness, steeped in the most egregious traditions of the rapacious, unregulated capitalist model. Simultaneously, they assert that any economic development undertaken by the so-called “non-chosen” countries must rigidly conform to the West’s “green” standards. Having completed their own era of intensive industrialisation, the OECD countries now impose political constraints on the economic growth of countries comprising the World Majority. They, however, do not hesitate to resort to “dirty practices” when mineral extraction and production are conducted at a distance from cities in the United States and Europe. The mounting demand for data transmission, processing, and storage required by emerging technologies – such as blockchain, AI, 5G mobile networks, and the Internet of Things – does not curtail, but rather exacerbates, CO2 emissions. The entire sector already accounts for over 3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – amounting to as much as 1.6 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2020. Carbon emissions are rising at a logarithmic pace.
  This deliberate “management” of:
  a) digitalisation,
  b) AI implementation, and
  c) the “green agenda”
has propelled the AI sector into a phase of revolutionary progress – a “quantum leap”. At the close of the last decade, a qualitatively new architecture of deep neural networks, known as transformers, was introduced; by the outset of the present decade, it had been deployed within truly mass-scale platforms such as ChatGPT, capable of adaptation to virtually every domain of human activity. It has now become evident that all subsequent processes of sustainable development, digital transformation, defence infrastructure, political engineering, mass communications, education, healthcare – even creativity in its broadest interpretation – will inevitably be interwoven with the universal application of these technologies. The trajectory of humanity’s evolutionary vector has revealed itself with clarity. The assertions made by Russian President Vladimir Putin have gained in credibility – namely, that the state which commands leadership in the production of such technologies will attain global supremacy, and that their deployment marks the commencement of a new chapter in human existence. This has already become a theatre of geopolitical rivalry, of colossal financial investment, and of new forms of technological expansion for the aforementioned reasons.

Multipolarity and international relations in the AI era

A thorough engagement with AI matters enables us to assert with confidence: AI, in line with the logic of its adherents, has spontaneously emerged as an autonomous cluster within international relations. Issues relating to neural networks are now permeating the agendas of international and regional structures at an accelerating pace.
  Among the most prominent developments, one may highlight the United Nations platform, where intergovernmental consultations are presently under way regarding the launch of a Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the formation of an International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. Consideration is also being given to the establishment of a dedicated UN fund to support technical assistance initiatives in this field. Since the beginning of the year, a digital office has been operating within the Secretariat of the Organisation. At UNESCO, vigorous discussions are taking place concerning the formation of ethical norms and standards for AI – based, in part, upon the 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Under the auspices of UNIDO, the Global Alliance on AI for Industry and Manufacturing is operational. The ITU convenes the annual “AI for Good Summit”. Even the OSCE has sought to carve out a niche in this domain. These rapidly evolving processes, unfolding across numerous multilateral platforms and forums, are unmistakable indicators of the intensifying global race for leadership in this sphere. They demand the unremitting attention and active engagement of the state – including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ultimately, the construction of a fair multipolar world is intrinsically dependent upon our capacity to thwart attempts at resurrecting neo-colonial exploitation and inequality in “digital form”. •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2025/nr-22-14-oktober-2025-1/ki-und-neokolonialismus

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