U.S. investments in advanced digital infrastructure abroad contrast with the lack of a cohesive strategy at home
The Lobito Corridor emphasizes the American desire to secure critical minerals for Big Tech irrespective of the human rights of miners in the DRC
Political gridlock and traditional industries hinder U.S. digital transformation efforts, widening the emerging industrial divide
The U.S. government just made a massive breakthrough in industrial digitalization, announcing plans to build a state-of-the-art network to transform rail transport using a combination of IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics and digital twin modeling, all integrated over 5G and cloud infrastructure.
But the network isn’t being deployed in the U.S. Instead, it’s part of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor project, which initially will connect Angola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This means that the Angolans and Congolese will shortly enjoy a far more advanced, digitally enhanced rail network than anything the U.S. government is building for its own citizens. Woo woo!
The Lobito Corridor program is a collaboration between the G7 nations. The U.S. is in the vanguard of the effort and has already committed half a billion dollars in loans to the project. That number will rise as it expands to other countries, including Zambia, Namibia and Botswana.
Why the largesse? This has nothing to do with philanthropy. It’s all about global politics, power and Big Tech priorities. It’s not a coincidence that the railway that forms the backbone of the Lobito Corridor terminates in the DRC, which accounts for 70% of the world’s supply of cobalt, a key component of electric vehicles as well as a slew of other minerals essential to big tech companies, including tantalum and copper.
These resources are often mined under highly exploitative forced labour conditions. But that’s less important to the U.S. and its partners than securing that critical Big Tech supply chain while simultaneously resisting China’s growing influence in Africa.
Will it succeed in thwarting the Chinese? It’s probably too late. China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which has been underway for over a decade, has firmly established Huawei and ZTE as the digital communications incumbents for many Sub-Saharan nations.
At the same time, the Lobito Corridor project shows that the U.S. government is capable of understanding and initiating a highly sophisticated digital industrial strategy — as long as it’s 7,000 miles away. But it can’t do it within its own borders, where political gridlock, local state agendas and resistance from traditional industries — most recently, ports — all stymie the transition to Industry 4.0.
Shockingly, the U.S. doesn’t even have a government-defined national digital industrialization strategy. Meanwhile, it continues to spend money on expunging perfectly good Chinese tech from U.S. soil — $3 billion here, another $20 billion there. Talk about missing the point.
At this very moment, all around the world, a new digital divide is opening up between governments that are driving the use of Industry 4.0 to reinvent their country’s economies — and those that aren’t. And the U.S. is sitting on the wrong side of that gap.