The Cold War has not returned in its old ideological uniform. There is no new Berlin Wall dividing capitalism from communism.
Instead, the emerging contest is being fought through semiconductors, artificial intelligence, undersea cables, digital platforms and the systems through which money crosses borders.
The central question of global power is increasingly simple: Who controls the infrastructure on which the modern world depends?
The United States-China rivalry sits at the centre of this technological contest, but Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas are not spectators.
Take semiconductors. Chips power smartphones, vehicles, telecommunications, weapons systems, data centres and artificial intelligence. Control over advanced chips has therefore become an instrument of economic and national security policy. Washington continues to regulate the export of advanced semiconductors to China.
In January, the US revised its rules to permit some advanced chips, including Nvidia's H200, to be considered for export to approved Chinese customers on a case-by-case basis and under security conditions.
China, meanwhile, is investing heavily in domestic semiconductor capability and reducing its exposure to Western-controlled technologies.
Europe has reached the same conclusion from another direction: dependence is vulnerability. The European Commission proposed Chips Act 2.0 in June, explicitly seeking to reduce strategic dependencies and strengthen European semiconductor production.
Europe is therefore no longer satisfied simply to regulate technology produced elsewhere; it wants technological sovereignty of its own.
Asia remains indispensable. Taiwan sits at the heart of advanced chip manufacturing, while Japan and South Korea occupy crucial positions in semiconductor equipment, materials and fabrication. Stanford's 2026 AI Index notes that a single Taiwanese foundry produces most of the leading chips powering today's AI infrastructure.
Then there are the cables beneath the oceans.
They attract little public attention, yet submarine cables carry about 99 per cent of global internet traffic. Financial transactions, cloud computing, government communications and ordinary WhatsApp messages ultimately depend on physical infrastructure lying on the seabed.
Europe is consequently investing in secure submarine cable systems as part of its strategic autonomy agenda.
Control over cable routes, landing stations, maintenance and data centres is therefore becoming as strategically important as control over ports and shipping lanes was in an earlier age.
AI represents another frontier. The assumption that the United States would permanently dominate advanced AI can no longer be taken for granted.
Stanford's 2026 AI Index reports that the performance gap between leading American and Chinese models has narrowed dramatically, with models from the two countries repeatedly exchanging leading positions.
That competition raises a larger question for Europe, India, Japan, Latin America and Africa: must countries permanently rent intelligence from foreign technology companies, or should they develop their own computing capacity, models, datasets and regulatory systems?
Finally comes money.
For decades, Western financial infrastructure and the dollar-centred international system have enjoyed enormous influence over cross-border transactions. But alternative networks are expanding. China's Cross-
Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) has grown into an important infrastructure for renminbi payments. By August, CIPS reported 1,853 participants, with its network reaching banking institutions across 192 countries and regions.
This does not mean that SWIFT or the dollar are disappearing. SWIFT itself is modernising, including work on blockchain-based infrastructure for tokenised, round-the-clock cross-border payments. What is emerging is competition over the architecture through which global money moves.
Africa must read these developments carefully.
The continent cannot afford merely to become the ground on which American, Chinese and European technological competition is fought.
Africa possesses critical minerals, a young population, rapidly expanding digital markets and some of the world's most innovative mobile-payment ecosystems. In countries including Kenya, a large share of remittance transactions is already conducted digitally.
The strategic question is therefore not whether Africa should “choose” Washington, Beijing or Brussels.
It is whether African states can negotiate from their own interests: diversify cable connections, develop regional data centres, protect critical minerals from purely extractive relationships, build AI skills, support local digital industries and strengthen interoperable African payment systems.
Latin America, India, the Gulf states and Southeast Asia face much the same choice. In a multipolar technological order, strategic autonomy may prove more valuable than permanent alignment.
The new Cold War is therefore less about flags and ideological slogans than about infrastructure.
Yesterday's superpowers competed for territory, missiles and military alliances. Today's powers increasingly compete for chips, cables, algorithms, data and payment rails.
The countries that understand this transformation early will shape the digital century. Those that do not may discover that political independence means much less when someone else controls the technology on which their economy runs.
The author is a scholar-diplomat and an expert in foreign and security policy based at Moi University, [email protected]
