Rest of World

Young people can’t seem to stop watching AI slop videos of cats talking and fruits cheating on each other. Older people are enjoying a different kind of AI-generated content, which provides them with much-needed comfort and companionship. Take Uncle Chang, a 67-year-old family friend who recently visited New York from Taiwan. As we chatted, the retired businessman showed me some YouTube videos that made him cry.

In his job as a nurse and healthcare administrator, Chris decided on appropriate treatments for patients, and checked their vital signs. Sometimes, he monitored up to 10 patients in intensive care — and he did it all from Manila, thousands of miles away from the U.S. hospital he worked for. Chris, who asked to go by a pseudonym because he is bound by nondisclosure agreements, moved through a dozen remote nursing jobs in U.S. hospitalsbetween 2020 and 2023.

One of the most significant developments today is the rapid growth of data centers and other artificial intelligence-related infrastructure. This is true of Africa, too, where demand for digital services is accelerating. South Africa, in particular, has emerged as one of the continent’s leading destinations for data center investment because of its connectivity, market size, and strategic position within the regional economy.

Involution — neijuan (内卷) in Mandarin, literally “inward curling” — entered everyday Chinese speech around 2020. The concept was borrowed from the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who described a pattern in colonial Java in the 1960s:  farming systems that grew more elaborate and complex without becoming more productive, absorbing ever more labor for diminishing returns.

Gordon Sheng, a 32-year-old civil engineer in China, spent two decades reading web novels before using AI to write his own. He used DeepSeek to outline a dramatic divorce plot, then generated the story in five minutes using an AI writing tool. Published on Tomato Novel, the short story drew over 5,500 reads in 10 days.

As frontier artificial intelligence becomes increasingly centralized in the hands of a few Western companies, India is betting that innovation doesn’t have to come only from the biggest labs. The country has launched a hackathon inviting startups, researchers, students, and academic institutions to build affordable, multilingual AI devices that work offline and run on open-source models.

China’s EV makers, squeezed at home, are moving into Europe’s idle car factories. Chery will start building EVs later this year at a former Nissan plant in Barcelona, Spain. It is also in talks to have its cars built at Nissan’s Sunderland, England, factory. Geely is reportedly taking over an idle hall at Ford’s plant near Valencia in Spain, and BYDiBYDBYD Auto is a Chinese carmaker that became the world’s leading EV manufacturer in 2023, competing with Tesla for market share and global attention.

Highly skilled immigrant tech workers in the U.S. are eyeing relocation to Canada, the U.K., or the Gulf as H-1B visa uncertainty continues to haunt them. On June 8, a U.S. judge ruled Donald Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas unenforceable, citing that the government lacked the authority to impose it. The ruling should have offered relief to thousands of immigrant tech workers. However, for many, the fee was only the latest reminder of how quickly the rules governing their lives can change.

One evening in the Maldives, I spent a few hours talking with local entrepreneurs. I expected to hear about tourism, politics, or the economy. Instead, they kept talking about Temu. Not artificial intelligence. Not semiconductors. Not even TikTok. Temu. The Chinese shopping app has become so popular in the Maldives, they told me, that it has changed how people buy everyday goods.

Despite all the global worry about China building car factories around the world and stifling local competitors, it turns out that Chinese EV companies have actually been homebodies. Between 2020 and 2024, China’s biggest EV and battery manufacturers BYDiBYDBYD Auto is a Chinese carmaker that became the world’s leading EV manufacturer in 2023, competing with Tesla for market share and global attention. and CATL were talking a big game about global expansion.