South Africa’s next crisis? Being offline in an AI-driven world

We’ve all heard the famous parable of the chessboard: start with one grain of rice, double it on each square, and by the time you reach the halfway point, you’ve got 43 tons of rice. But it’s the second half of the chessboard where things get truly mind-bending. We’re not just talking about rice anymore – we’re talking about artificial intelligence, and folks, we’ve just entered that exponential second half.

Remember Moore’s Law? The prediction that transistors on chips would double every two years? Well, that quaint little rule has been absolutely obliterated by AI development. According to Nvidia’s CEO (for context, Nvidia is the world’s leading manufacturer of AI chips), we’ve witnessed a thousand-fold improvement in AI chips over just the past decade.

Their latest AI chips are 32 times faster than their predecessors. Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture GPUs now deliver up to 25 times better performance and energy efficiency than their predecessors. To put this in perspective, if your internet connection improved at the same rate, you’d be downloading entire Netflix libraries in the time it takes to blink.

This isn’t just impressive engineering – it’s the foundation of a technological revolution that’s about to reshape every aspect of our lives. And unlike the fictional Skynet from the Terminator movies, this isn’t some distant dystopian future. It’s happening right now, and it’s happening fast.

Enter Stargate UAE: the real-world portal to our AI future

Speaking of science-fiction becoming reality, let’s talk about Stargate UAE – and no, Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t coming back from the future to stop this one. This isn’t a portal to distant galaxies; it’s something far more significant to our immediate future.

Set to begin operations in 2026, Stargate UAE will span 10 square miles and eventually provide 5GW of AI data centre capacity. To put this staggering scale into perspective, this single facility will be 12 times larger than South Africa’s entire current data centre capacity.

The first phase alone will use hundreds of thousands of advanced Nvidia GPUs, consuming as much power daily as a small country like Portugal – equivalent to three Koeberg power stations running continuously.

With an estimated 625 000 Grace Blackwell servers when fully operational, this facility will dwarf Google’s approximately 50 000 servers that power cloud and Gemini AI, and Facebook’s 20 000 servers for Meta AI. It’s 100 times bigger than most of today’s large data centres. This isn’t just scaling up – this is scaling up to an entirely different league of computational power.

The job market reality check

While we’re marvelling at these technological achievements, let’s address the elephant in the room: jobs. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could displace 300 million jobs globally by 2030, with McKinsey suggesting 375 million workers will need to change careers entirely. The manufacturing sector alone could see 20 million jobs lost by 2030 – positions that will be nearly impossible to replace with equivalent alternatives.

This isn’t just about robots taking over factories. AI is already creating business cards, writing Python scripts and answering customer service queries. It’s performing tasks across the spectrum of human employment, from clerical work to creative endeavours. While historical technological innovations have eventually created new employment opportunities, the transition period typically involves significant economic disruption.

The harsh reality is that societies don’t typically re-skill fast enough to avoid economic shock. This creates a dangerous window of opportunity for authoritarian regimes to exploit social unrest, potentially using the very AI technology that displaced workers to curtail liberties and human rights.

Beyond Terminator: the real AI concerns

Are we building Skynet? Probably not – mainly because we’re hopefully not stupid enough to hand military control over to machines. However, the reality is more nuanced and arguably more concerning.

A 2020 UN report suggested that drones used in an attack on Turkey made autonomous decisions to engage targets. While current military drones like the Switchblade and Lancet models used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict still require human confirmation for lethal decisions, Ukraine has been rapidly deploying AI-enhanced drones with increasing autonomy – purchasing 10 000 AI-enhanced units in 2024 alone.

The real danger isn’t a malevolent AI uprising – it’s our potential over-dependence on systems we don’t fully understand or control. We’re already seeing AI-powered cyberattacks being deployed in modern political conflicts, and we’re nowhere near solving the fundamental challenges of AI alignment and ethics before these systems become exponentially more powerful.

The South African context

In a country where the digital divide between urban and rural areas continues to widen, the implications of an AI-driven world are almost unfathomable. Those without reliable internet access, already excluded from basic economic participation and social services, will lose all hope of ever finding employment outside of non-robotic menial labour.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, especially in the context of South Africa’s internet infrastructure.

As AI becomes embedded in everything from home appliances to billing systems, reliable internet access will transition from convenience to absolute necessity. We’re not just talking about streaming entertainment or checking e-mail – we’re talking about basic household functions.

Your smart fridge will need internet to optimise food storage and suggest recipes. Your car will require connectivity for navigation, safety systems and even basic operation. Your home security, energy management, healthcare monitoring and financial transactions will all depend on stable internet connections that feed back into AI data centres.

Rural communities that already struggle with basic connectivity will find themselves increasingly marginalised as AI becomes the foundation of service delivery, education, healthcare and commerce. The “have-nots” of internet access will become the “have-nots” of modern society itself.

Preparing for the inevitable

We’re standing at the threshold of the second half of the chessboard. What we consider impressive AI capabilities today will seem quaint compared to what’s coming in the next one, two or five years. The exponential growth curve shows no signs of slowing down – if anything, it’s accelerating way beyond even Moore’s Law’s linear predictions.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform our world, it’s whether we’ll build the infrastructure and social frameworks necessary to navigate this transformation successfully. For South Africa, this means treating internet infrastructure not as a luxury or business opportunity, but as fundamental infrastructure equivalent to roads, electricity and water.

The future isn’t coming – it’s already here, being built in 10-square-mile data centres and powered by hundreds of thousands of AI servers. The only question is whether we’ll be connected and aware when it fully arrives, or whether we’ll be left behind in an increasingly AI-dependent world.

So yes, tell your kids to consider plumbing – but also make sure they’ll have the internet connection to run their AI-powered business management systems, customer service bots and smart diagnostic tools. Because in the second half of the chessboard, even the pipes will be smart.

• The author, Paul Colmer, is executive committee member at the Wireless Access Providers’ Association
• Read more articles by Paul Colmer on TechCentral