Digital geopolitics and AI stack competition for SDG 9: A strategic quantification perspective

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) technological stacks have emerged as a major political issue in the context of sustainable development, since access to chips, data, cloud platforms, software ecosystems and human resources and regulatory interoperability determines countries’ capacity to use AI for industrial upgrading. This article investigates the relationship between digital geopolitical pressures, competitiveness of the AI stack and industrial and innovation outputs related to SDG 9. The study develops an AI Stack Competitiveness Index (ASCI) based on publicly available secondary data, including the Global Innovation Index, ITU ICT statistics and ITU ICT Development Index materials, World Bank World Development Indicators, OECD.AI Data and UN-based voting alignment information. Balanced analytical panel for countries 2018–2023 is composed of country-year harmonization, normalization and selection of missing data. Empirical design involves principal component analysis, two-way fixed-effects panel regression and gradient-boosted classification. External geopolitical exposure variables are excluded from the PCA-derived index and variables used to construct ASCI are not included on the right-hand side of the ASCI model in order to minimize mechanical overlap. The findings show conditional relationships between geopolitical openness, access to semiconductors and the competitiveness of the AI stack. The classifier is used for diagnosis purposes and not as evidence of causality, and the use of the tier classification is done with caution using leakage-sensitive feature selection and robustness checks. The article provides a clear toolset to assess digital geopolitics and AI stack capabilities in light of SDG 9, and discusses how open-stack partnerships could help mitigate downstream risks for countries not in the primary AI clusters.