BRUSSELS — The map of artificial intelligence is being redrawn not in code but in customs law, export controls, and the concrete floors of data centers. Three dispatches arriving this week from Washington, Brussels, and the wider policy establishment describe the same phenomenon from different vantage points: AI governance has become a theater of great-power competition, and nobody wants to be a spectator.
In Washington, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies are parsing what an upcoming U.S.-China summit might mean for the fragile scaffolding of global AI rules — export controls on chips, competing standards bodies, and the question of whether either capital trusts the other enough to coordinate at all. The answer, so far, is: barely.
Meanwhile in Brussels, the calculus is different. A new analysis in Eurasia Review frames Europe's data center buildout as a bid for strategic autonomy — a continent trying to host its own compute rather than rent it from Virginia or Shenzhen. Every hyperscale facility poured into German or Nordic soil is, in this reading, a small act of sovereignty.
For a company like Trilogy, whose Skyvera and Totogi units sell billing and network software to telecoms operating across dozens of jurisdictions, and whose Crossover platform staffs projects from more than 130 countries, this fragmentation is not abstract theory. It is the terrain. A world where compute, talent, and regulation all answer to different flags is a world where the plumbing of global software — routing, payment, compliance — gets harder, not easier, to build.
The scholars call it 'technological nationalism.' The engineers just call it Tuesday.
