A former Google executive says the West is sleepwalking into irrelevance. Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, explains why every nation that fails to build its own AI infrastructure will become a technology colony of the United States and China, dependent on imported intelligence the way developing nations once depended on imported manufacturing.

Mo draws a direct comparison to how China built its tech independence. When Google operated in China, Russian search engine Yandex was protected by the government through regulation that made it difficult for American companies to dominate. The result was that domestic competitors were forced to exist, and they became competitive. He argues the UK and Europe are doing the opposite: importing every piece of software, every AI model, and every platform from Silicon Valley, sending trillions in licensing fees overseas while building nothing domestically.

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• Why every nation not building its own AI will become \.