El País links AI data centers, China’s ‘Summer Davos’ and Mexico’s lag

This column is a vivid snapshot of how uneven the ‘race to AGI’ looks from outside the US–China–EU core. While China spends its Summer Davos touting “China Opportunity 2.0” and positioning AI as core national infrastructure, Mexico is still debating whether deepfakes in election campaigns should be labeled. The author’s frustration underscores a broader pattern: frontier labs and rich economies are sprinting ahead on deployment and industrial strategy, while many emerging markets remain stuck on first‑order questions of regulation and basic digital capacity.([elpais.com](https://elpais.com/mexico/2026-06-28/un-vistazo-al-futuro.html))

For readers of Race to AGI, the important signal is geopolitical, not technical. If Latin American economies like Mexico become mostly passive importers of models, data centers and cloud services built elsewhere, they will have little leverage over safety standards, wages, or how AI reshapes their labor markets. The Vancouver protests the piece cites are a reminder that even in advanced economies, local communities are pushing back against the physical footprint of AI—from data center water use to grid stress. That same backlash could show up in Mexico once the infrastructure arrives, but without the benefit of domestic champions or robust governance.

In practice, this means the “global” AI race is really a race among a handful of states and firms, with the rest of the world negotiating from the sidelines. Whether emerging markets can move from being just markets to becoming co‑developers of AI systems will affect not just who captures value, but also whose norms and safety preferences get baked into the next generation of near‑AGI models.