What is Pax Silica initiative?
Pax Silica is the US Department of State’s flagship effort on AI and supply chain security, advancing new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners. Pax Silica is an economic security coalition built for the AI age. Under the initiative, countries are organizing around compute, silicon, minerals and energy as shared strategic assets.
“If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it. This historic declaration hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow—from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing and models,” according to Jacob Helberg, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs.
What the Pax Silica declaration states?
It recognises that a reliable supply chain is indispensable to mutual economic security and Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a transformative force for long-term prosperity and that trustworthy systems are essential to safeguarding our mutual security and prosperity.
The technological revolution in AI is accelerating, increasingly reorganising the world economy, and reshaping global supply chains. The economic value and growth will flow through and across all levels of the global AI supply chain, driving historic opportunity and demand for energy, critical minerals, manufacturing, technological hardware, infrastructure, and new markets not yet invented.
“In this spirit, we declare our shared vision to deepen our economic partnership through shared efforts on investment security practices, infrastructure and incentives,” the declaration states.
Through this cooperation, we pursue a comprehensive economic partnership to build an economic security order based on trust, technological complementarity, shared interests and a shared commitment to a more prosperous future, it adds.
What are the focus areas of the initiative?
It encourages efforts to partner on strategic stacks of the global technology supply chain, including, but not limited to, software applications and platforms, frontier foundation models, information connectivity and network infrastructure, compute and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, transportation logistics, minerals refining and processing, and energy.
It also focuses on mobilizing the immense creative and financial power of private industry and entrepreneurship to make supply chains more secure.
List of countries which have signed the initiative so far?
Recently Qatar signed the Pax Silica Declaration. The United Arab Emirates will join the initiative soon. Qatar is the eighth Pax Silica signatory. It joined signatories from Australia, Israel, Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Additional signatories are expected to follow.
Read more: https://www.state.gov/pax-silica
