Latin America’s Digital Non-Alignment Gains Ground in the AI Crossfire

Washington offers AI built for dominance, Beijing touts cooperation and infrastructure sharing. Latin America, squeezed between standards, chips, and geopolitics, is weighing a third path—one that prizes interoperability, cultural trust, and sovereignty over lock-in. The decision will shape generations.

Two Competing Blueprints

This past summer, the United States unveiled Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, a strategy that describes artificial intelligence as a zero-sum contest. The accompanying executive order launched an AI Exports Program promising a full U.S. stack—from chips and cloud to models and guardrails—and urging allies to adopt American standards. Latin American officials interviewed by Americas Quarterly compared it to a “digital Monroe Doctrine,” a bid to create spheres of influence through contracts and code.

China countered with its Action Plan on Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, calling AI a “global public good.” Beijing pledged UN-based rule-making, knowledge transfer, and infrastructure support for the Global South. Premier Li Qiang stressed cooperation over competition. The pitch is bolstered by cheaper options and tools like DeepSeek that feel attainable for governments under budget pressure. But, as policymakers told Americas Quarterly, buying into a Chinese ecosystem wholesale could swap dependencies—updates, patches, and data pipelines—from Washington to Beijing.

Both visions are designed to bind partners tightly. Latin America must now decide whether to sign up or to draft its own.

Pressure Points in the Region

For Brazil, the tightrope is real. It has codified an AI ethics framework and built research centers like CPQD, yet still relies heavily on U.S. clouds and developer ecosystems while courting Chinese financing for telecoms and manufacturing. Officials in Brasília told Americas Quarterly the challenge is to keep space for homegrown innovation without antagonizing either superpower.

Mexico faces sharper constraints. A 2,000-mile border with the U.S. makes Chinese infrastructure a national security red flag for Washington. Still, Mexican industry remains deeply integrated into Chinese supply chains, and its digital economy requires multiple partners to prevent shortages in chips and connectivity.

Chile, with ambitions to be a neutral regional hub, is marketing itself as a meeting point for data and cloud. Argentina’s courts, meanwhile, have already slowed state surveillance tools on privacy and due-process grounds, underscoring a civic culture that shapes technology adoption. Analysts told Americas Quarterly the diversity of political systems and industrial bases makes a single alignment impossible—hence the appeal of a third way.

Digital Non-Alignment as Strategy

That third way is what scholars and officials increasingly call digital non-alignment. The idea is to create interoperable standards and diversified infrastructure that let countries draw from both ecosystems while maintaining sovereignty. Some of the pieces are already visible.

Chile’s CENIA is leading LatamGPT, a regional model project where training data and roadmaps are steered by Latin American institutions. The hardware mix is deliberately plural: U.S. hyperscalers like AWS alongside Huawei cloud and regional providers, stitched together with the new Humboldt undersea cable linking South America to Asia-Pacific via Google.

Brazil’s $4 billion AI Plan aims to promote sovereignty through domestic models, public financing via BNDES, and rule-setting via the G20 and UN, while still allowing room for foreign vendors to prevent lock-in.

Scaled up, the region could form a Latin American AI consortium to pool research funds, share scarce GPU clusters, and co-own strategic datasets—from agriculture yields to climate models—under regional governance. Joint procurement would prevent any single country from being cornered by exclusivity clauses. Institutions like Mercosur, the Pacific Alliance, and the IDB could anchor a standards spine grounded in Latin American values, not imported templates. Officials told Americas Quarterly that such a move would give Brasília, Santiago, and Mexico City more leverage in negotiations with both powers.

Culture, Trust, and a Homegrown Market

Sovereignty is not just hardware and code. It is also a social license. Latin America’s legal culture leans toward human-centered tech: Brazil’s LGPD guarantees the right to review automated decisions; Chile’s AI policy is undergoing public consultation; Argentine courts suspended Buenos Aires’ facial recognition system on privacy grounds. These instincts make the region fertile ground for trustworthy AI systems with contestability and explainability built in from the start.

That ethic could become a market advantage. While U.S. and Chinese firms chase massive frontier models, Latin American developers can focus on practical breakthroughs: credit scoring with appeal rights, farm forecasting tuned for smallholders, logistics that cut port delays, or health triage tools that respect privacy. Legal scholars told Americas Quarterly that cooperative traditions—agricultural co-ops, community health networks, solidarity finance—can guide AI adoption with less resistance and clearer public value.

Culture is no guarantee. Procurement reform, data stewardship, and incentives that reward real outcomes are still needed. But trust itself can be an economic niche, one that makes Latin American AI distinct rather than derivative.

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The Clock Is Ticking

The window for genuine choice is closing fast. Washington and Beijing are already hardening lanes through export controls, cloud credits, and preferred-vendor partnerships. Countries that hesitate may soon find themselves choosing not between two philosophies, but between leftovers once the map is drawn.

A regional strategy is still within reach: build an interoperable stack, treat data as a strategic asset with accountable governance, federate compute across borders, and leverage both ecosystems without being locked into either. As officials told Americas Quarterly, the real trap is believing the only options are American dominance or Chinese cooperation.

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Latin America can choose differently—crafting standards that fit its development goals, embedding trust in technology, and keeping sovereignty in its own hands. The decision will determine whether AI becomes another story of dependency, or the moment the region writes its own script in the digital century.