Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, recently donned a helmet, work boots and a luminescent high-visibility vest to visit the construction site of the company’s new data center project in Texas. Bigger than New York’s Central Park, the estimated $60 billion project, which has its own natural gas plant, will be one of the most powerful computing hubs ever created when completed as soon as next year. Around the same time as Mr. Altman’s visit to Texas, Nicolás Wolovick, a computer science professor at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina, was running what counts as one of his country’s most advanced A.I. computing hubs. It was in a converted room at the university, where wires snaked between aging A.I. chips and server computers. “Everything is becoming more split,” Dr. Wolovick said. “We are losing.” Artificial intelligence has created a new digital divide, fracturing the world between nations with the computing power for building cutting-edge A.I. systems and those without.

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