“Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centers powering artificial intelligence,” reports the Financial Times:
Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top U.S. export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades.
Mexico is the second-largest provider of enterprise servers to the US so far this year, with sales reaching $46.9bn, behind Taiwan, which sold $53.5bn, though Mexico became the largest on a monthly basis in May.
The phenomenon is helping prop up Mexico’s limp economy, pushing the country’s exports to record levels. Servers and related hardware made up almost one-fifth of the $317bn of goods Mexico exported between January and May, more than double the same period a year earlier. Taiwan, in turn, is now Mexico’s third-largest trading partner, up from eighth place in 2022. Taiwanese companies have spent more than $1.6bn since 2020 on Mexican factories that offer geographic proximity and tariff-free access to US tech giants spending hundreds of billions on data centers.
“Mexico is of tremendous importance to the way this new AI-powered economy is working,” said Jesse Rogers, head of Latin America economics at Moody’s Analytics. “It is really a new frontier of collaboration and even dependency on the Mexican economy when it comes to AI servers.”
The nation of Zambia, which is poor and heavily in debt, found new mineral wealth using artificial intelligence.
Kenyan farmers are using artificial intelligence to produce much more food.
An artificial intelligence algorithm outperforms radiologists in diagnosing prostate cancer from MRI scans, reports Inside Precision Medicine. It also cuts false positive diagnoses in half, according to a study by medical researchers.
Doctors overseas are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively.
Artificial intelligence is also being used to generate highly-effective antibodies to fight disease.
Artificial intelligence now produces three-quarters of Google’s code, compared to only one-quarter in October 2024.
On the other hand, a journalist’s discoveries using artificial intelligence led to bombings of airstrips by the Venezuelan military.
