ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY
INTERCONNECTION
Pax Silica and WAICO: two opposing camps, one logic of dependence
“The United States is closing off access, China is opening up its models. Two opposite methods, one and the same goal.” This sentence comes from the 8th episode of the investigation that Sismique devotes to AI.
It struck me, and on reflection, I asked myself: opposite, really?
In December 2025, the United States launched Pax Silica, a non-binding declaration that organises cooperation on chips, critical minerals, computing and data infrastructure.
Its aim is to reduce “coercive dependencies”, in other words those that do not go through them.
On the other side of the globe, in July 2026, China founded WAICO with 29 founding countries, betting on open ecosystems.
These two strategies, however rational, actually rest on the same logic: “dependence is manufactured by selling at a loss until the thing becomes indispensable.”
And what about us? In June, Paris denounced Pax Silica as an attempt at the “colonisation of Europe”. Yet in practice, on 25 June, the European Union signed up.
In August, Mistral began serving GLM 5.2, a model from the Chinese lab Z.ai, as is, for inference.
Admittedly, the choice makes commercial sense. Their CTO says that “there was no good reason not to do it”, and he is probably right as far as the product goes.
What interests me is the combined effect of these two facts, because it puts us in both camps at once.
Seen from an internet exchange point, the tune sounds familiar. The episode describes the best models as living “on the servers of those who built them”, accessible “through a tap they control”. Cutting off access is “the monopoly of disconnection, with no judge and no appeal.”
An IXP is exactly the opposite: networks that choose to depend on one another, as peers, on neutral, shared infrastructure, with traffic that stays local. Nobody holds the tap alone.
To borrow the same episode’s phrase: “a power that needs you remains a power that can be held to account.” From models to data, and from data to the cables that carry it: autonomy is built layer by layer, and interconnection is one of those layers.
Julien Devaureix closes his series with a sentence I am keeping: “I am not nothing, I am not powerless, and neither are you.”
For the curious, here is the link to the episode.
This news was first published on LinkedIn. To comment or share it, head to the original post. → See the post