The Global South is building its own AI on $50 hardware — and it's working
Three years ago, when I moved to Singapore to focus on building a business, I assumed the most interesting AI story would keep unfolding in San Francisco and Shenzhen.
Deeper reporting,
thinking made visible.
Original investigations, profile features, and longer essays from the Silicon Canals editorial team. Pieces published here go through additional research and review.
Technology
SpaceX, Amazon, and Google want orbital data centers — four engineering barriers reveal who really benefits
Three years ago, when I moved to Singapore for wealth accumulation and business scaling, I was struck by the sheer physical presence of the data infrastructure around me.
The $50 AI revolution: Why smaller models built for sovereignty may matter more than the trillion-dollar arms race
The cost of building a frontier AI model has crossed significant financial thresholds in training compute alone, and the countries that cannot pay that price are not waiting around for charity.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster goes to trial: the antitrust case that could force the biggest entertainment breakup in decades
The DOJ and 40 state attorneys general have opened a landmark antitrust trial against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, alleging the company's 86% market share in primary ticketing constitutes an illegal monopoly — while Live Nation argues its actual share is 40% and its business simply brings people joy.
A US government iPhone hacking tool has gone feral — and 42,000 devices are already infected
A sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit called Coruna — likely developed by US government contractors — has proliferated from American intelligence through Russian espionage operations to cybercriminals, infecting an estimated 42,000 devices and exposing the structural contradictions of government-funded offensive cyber capabilities.
I mapped who profits when a country’s internet gets shut down — and it may not be who you think
Internet shutdowns are framed as acts of authoritarian overreach, but the profit chains behind them implicate surveillance tech vendors, VPN companies, consulting firms, and financial analysts across the globe. I mapped who benefits when a country goes dark.
I traced who owns the undersea cables that carry 95% of global internet traffic — the map is a colonial one
I traced the ownership of the undersea cables carrying 95% of global internet traffic and found a map that mirrors colonial geography with unsettling precision — the same ports, the same routes, the same directional logic of extraction, now controlled by a handful of tech giants.
Silicon Valley built a religion around disruption — then quietly made sure nothing fundamental changes
Silicon Valley perfected the aesthetics of revolution while systematically preventing anything revolutionary from taking root. The disruption flows downward; the consolidation flows upward.
The global south is being surveilled into compliance and Silicon Valley calls it development
Biometric IDs, cashless payment rails, and AI credit scoring are being deployed across the Global South under the banner of development. But when the data flows to Silicon Valley and the populations can't opt out, we need to call this what it is: surveillance infrastructure dressed as inclusion.