Silicon Valley’s vision for global AI is flawed: each country needs its own blueprint

In April, South Africa withdrew its draft national artificial-intelligence policy after the document was found to have cited several fabricated academic references. These sources turned out to be AI ‘hallucinations’. The policy had been partially drafted using AI. The irony was hard to ignore: a framework designed to govern AI was undermined by the very technology it sought to regulate. But beyond the hallucinated citations lies a deeper issue. The document reflected a broader assumption that is increasingly visible in AI policy worldwide: that global AI systems will be built by replicating and expanding the same computational and infrastructure model that has been pioneered in Silicon Valley for wealthy economies. Modern AI systems were developed under conditions of extraordinary abundance: cheap capital, plentiful energy, vast computing infrastructure and access to land and water for cooling. This has shaped the assumption that building ever larger models and increasing their scale is the way forward. But it is already running into physical constraints. Nature ’s message to South Africa’s next government: talk to your researchers Data centres are notorious guzzlers of water and electricity. South Africa is a water-scarce country; until a year ago, it resorted to scheduled blackouts (referred to as load shedding) to manage its frequent electricity shortages. …