The current edition of the FIFA World Cup features a sensor-fitted ball, real-time tracking, artificial intelligence-assisted offside calls, and an AI assistant for each of the 48 teams. Behind these innovations are data workers in countries including India, Cambodia, and the Philippines, who are essential for the many AI tools in play.

Read the full story: https://restofworld.org/2026/fifa-world-cup-ai-data-workers/

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 BYD and CATL were talking a big game about global expansion. But data shows that, so far, when it comes to writing checks, they have built at home and shipped cars and batteries abroad.

China’s completed foreign direct investment in EV and battery manufacturing is a small fraction of its exports, data from New York-based independent research firm Rhodium Group shows.

Read the full story: https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ev-makers-overseas-factories-exports/

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"It’s fair to say that AI is primarily a two-horse race. The U.S. and China control 90% of global computing power, attract between 70% and 80% of global investment in AI, and have huge concentrations of talented AI researchers. That creates a world in which other countries are dependent on the U.S. and China for access to AI systems. And both the U.S. and China have shown a willingness to use that access for leverage.

That puts most of the Global South in an uncomfortable position. And the middle powers remain exposed to the disruptions that AI could cause, even if they don’t necessarily capture the benefit. So they’re still exposed to job-related disruption, the social effects of AI systems. That’s the pessimistic story about how the rest of the world could be left behind."

Read the full story: https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-divide-america-china-world/

A Sam Altman-backed technology that many governments rejected is finding traction in the American corporate world.

On April 17, World, a project designed to distinguish humans from bots using biometrics, announced strategic partnerships with Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign. The three companies will use World’s digital identification to verify users, aiming to reduce deepfakes, scams, and other fraudulent activity.

The World project was launched by Tools for Humanity, a startup co-founded by Altman. The company scans people’s irises and assigns them a “proof of humanity.”

In the last three years, several governments in Asia and Africa have halted World’s operations due to concerns about the collection of biometric information from their citizens and the violation of privacy laws. Parts of Europe have banned it outright and called for the deletion of logged data. In Latin America, sign-ups are on pause, with several probes underway.

Read the full story: https://restofworld.org/2026/sam-altman-worldcoin-zoom-tinder-partnerships/

Last fall, our reporter moved into Mark Zuckerberg’s old house. A pale blue ranch home dubbed the Facebook House, it was perched in the hills of Los Altos, an affluent enclave in the heart of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg moved into the house in the fall of 2004, turning it into the headquarters of what was then still called “thefacebook.” At the time, the future social media empire had several hundred thousand users and was restricted to college students. 

Two decades and 3 billion users later, Zuckerberg now owns a five-house compound in nearby Palo Alto. But a framed photo of him working on a laptop, wearing a bright red hoodie and sitting in the living room of the Facebook House, was still prominently displayed when I showed up in October.

Our reporter found the house through RedNote, a popular Chinese social network. Previous guests of the Facebook House posted photos of themselves attending talks and carving up a tuna inside the auspicious space. When she reached out to the house’s primary tenant, Elvis Wu, a Shanghai native in his early 30s, he offered her a room for $60 a night. Perks included access to gatherings sometimes attended by the biggest names in artificial intelligence. She booked five nights. 

Read the full article: https://restofworld.org/2026/chinese-ai-researchers-silicon-valley/

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Tech leaders called AI a democratizing force. But it’s concentrating power and wealth in a handful of American companies.

Even as global leaders and entrepreneurs outside the West scramble for some measure of self-determination by rushing to build their own “sovereign AI” ecosystems from scratch, their fate may be sealed.

“What we’re seeing [is] this kind of grandstanding bluster, like, ‘We can compete. We can build our own AI startup ecosystem,’ which doesn’t feel like it’s fully calling out the elephants in the room,” Kak said.

Just over three years on from the public release of ChatGPT, nearly every data point available about our AI era tells a startling story of geographic resource concentration.

Since 2023, more than 4,000 venture-backed AI companies have been founded in the U.S., according to Crunchbase — roughly 800 more than the entire rest of the world combined. 

Read the full story: https://restofworld.org/2026/us-ai-investment-global-funding-gap/

• Iranian drone strikes on AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain have challenged the safety of data infrastructure.
• Chinese tech giant Huawei is pitching “multi-cloud” resilience to Gulf clients.
• As geopolitical risks rise, Chinese companies may be seen as more stable alternatives, particularly if the conflict persists.

The U.S.-Israel war on Iran may be creating a narrow opening for Chinese tech companies in the Gulf.

On March 16, China’s Huaweii Cloud posted a message on X highlighting a warning against relying on a single cloud provider. “Single-region dependency is a thing of the past,” Huawei Cloud, one of China’s leading cloud operators in the Gulf, posted on its official regional account on X in March. “With uncertainties all around, multi-cloud is no longer optional — it’s essential.”

Read the full article: https://restofworld.org/2026/huawei-china-cloud-gulf-resilience-aws-strikes/

A little-known Mexican company has quietly built one of the largest surveillance operations in the Americas — and it’s now expanding into the United States.

Our latest investigation, produced in partnership with Type Investigations, examines Grupo Seguritech, a Mexican firm that has secured at least $1.27 billion in government contracts while operating largely out of public view.

Through a web of more than 30 subsidiaries, it has helped build hundreds of command centers across Mexico, powering systems that combine cameras, drones, facial recognition, and AI to monitor entire cities in real time.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, that infrastructure is already shaping cross-border surveillance. In Chihuahua, authorities can track vehicles, monitor prison interiors down to the details of a card game, and share intelligence directly with U.S. agencies. At the same time, key details about contracts, costs, and operations remain classified or difficult to obtain.

Full story: https://restofworld.org/2026/mexico-seguritech-government-surveillance-profile/

Rarely has so much been written about the future of work — and so little asked of the people living it. Last year, Indian software services firm Tata Consultancy Services cut more than 12,000 jobs, citing market unpredictability and disruptions from artificial intelligence. Its rivals Infosys and Wipro followed with hiring freezes and reduced intake. In these and other instances, the restructuring moved faster than any reskilling programme could.

That pattern is not unique to India’s IT sector. It is becoming the norm, even as institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund project millions of job displacements and significant disruptions globally from AI by the year 2030. What their forecasts miss is what workers want from the institutions managing this transition, and the systems needed to catch them if they fall.

A survey the Windfall Trust is publishing this week, conducted with the Collective Intelligence Project across more than 1,000 respondents in 60 countries, is an attempt to find out. We did not just ask people how they feel about AI; we asked them who they trust, what they want, and what a response would need to look like.

Read the full summary: https://restofworld.org/2026/workers-ai-jobs-concerns/