The UN’s digital ambassador warns that AI’s influence is concentrated in ‘a few zip codes,’ calling for global action.

Big tech companies use computing clusters with millions of GPUs to train and run AI models. But across the African continent — which includes 54 countries and more than 1.5 billion people — fewer than 1,000 GPUs are available for researchers and developers to train models on local language datasets.

That disparity reflects what the United Nations’ top digital envoy calls “abundance of technological power and wealth” in a few zip codes — not just countries or regions, but landlocked areas, particularly in the US, where companies shaping AI are based.

He didn’t name names, but the point hit close to home for the Seattle audience: 98109 for Amazon, 98052 for Microsoft.

Delivering a keynote speech on Zoom at Seattle University’s 2026 Ethics and Tech conference on Friday, Executive Secretary Amandeep Singh Gill called 2026 “the most” of AI dominance, as technology moves from modeling capabilities and infrastructure investments to systems that perform real-world tasks autonomously.

Gill pointed to the global response to Anthropic’s Mythos AI model — a company that has balked at broad public disclosures about cybersecurity concerns — as an example of why AI governance requires a comprehensive, international approach.

Here are some of the key messages of his speech.

AI can be a “systemic risk.” Gill said the technology is a “relatively small threat” now but warned that it could soon overtake cybersecurity defenses, fuel armed conflict, and erode public trust with deep lies and misinformation. “If we cannot distinguish between what is true and what is not true, real or imagined, we lose this common sense of understanding the facts,” he said.

Armed conflict can be devastating. Gill warned that AI risks “lowering the threshold of conflict, obfuscating accountability under international humanitarian law, and subjecting us to spiraling levels beyond our control.”

AI power demands threaten climate goals. The power required for large-scale linguistic models, agent systems, and projections is already threatening national targets, Gill warns. Data center emissions, water consumption for cooling, computer hardware profits, and mining costs are compounded – and declining proportionately in low-income countries.

AI is both a “potential solution and a stressor” of nature. It may improve renewable energy grids and accelerate progress in integration with batteries, but short-term costs are mounting. Gill said the UN is exploring how to ensure equality and reform just “in these times.”

The UN is creating an AI science panel modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Led by journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa and Turing Prize-winning AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, the 40-member panel was deliberately made up of only two members each from China and the US, and another 36 from other countries, including seven from Africa, to ensure that many countries were heard. Its first report is expected in July 2026.

The UN is putting AI governance discussions under one roof. Discussions about AI have previously occurred in separate, less prescriptive circles. We are now being brought to what Gill calls a “horizontal platform” where policymakers from all 193 countries can learn from each other and develop common approaches.

Gill called AI dominance “an autonomous decision.” The UN won’t tell countries how to regulate AI, but governance structures mean little if countries don’t have the capacity to participate. Gill called for support for community-driven AI projects that invest in local research and ecosystem innovation, allowing people to use these tools to solve their own problems.

He acknowledged that the UN is working with limited resources against a major challenge, but said the alternative is to leave the AI ​​route to market forces and political competition.

He said the goal is a world where AI empowers democracies and communities, and creates opportunities not just for “a few billions and billionaires” but for everyone.