A small number of firms, including Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, now exercise significant control over AI infrastructure, data, and labor markets. They displace risk and legal liability downward through supply chains even as control over production and profit accumulation remains highly centralized. These dynamics are intensified by the fact that many dominant AI firms remain headquartered within the United States and are closely intertwined with broader American strategic and technological interests.

It increasingly looks like these firms are exerting monopsony power — a situation in which workers, from content moderators in Kenya to entry-level engineers in India, confront labor markets where a small number of dominant firms employ most workers and thereby exert disproportionate influence over wages and working conditions. At the same time, capital mobility enables firms to rapidly reorganize production in response to labor unrest, legal challenges, or regulatory pressure.

These dynamics also reshape the position of states, particularly in the Global South. Governments compete to attract AI infrastructure and investment through subsidies, tax incentives, regulatory concessions, and favorable legal regimes. This produces a further structural asymmetry: while AI firms retain the ability to reorganize production across borders, states are positioning themselves as increasingly dependent on privately controlled AI infrastructure and the economic activity attached to it.

When this concentration of power goes unchecked, the result is a system in which both workers and states, particularly in the Global South, become ever more dependent on AI infrastructure controlled by a small number of American firms, while possessing limited capacity to shape the conditions under which technological development, value extraction, and market participation take place.

Yet the very concentration of power that has enabled a small number of firms to dominate AI supply chains may also generate new forms of political vulnerability for them. Unlike earlier phases of globalized production, where labor struggles, consumer movements, environmental campaigns, and regulatory conflicts were often dispersed across different sectors and corporate actors, the contemporary organization of digital capitalism increasingly concentrates these antagonisms around the same set of firms.

Meanwhile, the deeply networked and digital character of contemporary social life makes the operations, influences, and harms of these corporations far more visible across sectors and regions, allowing struggles that once appeared isolated to increasingly recognize their connection to shared systems of corporate power.

This convergence is already visible across labor struggles in multiple sectors and regions: content moderators in Kenya confronting exploitation and psychological harm, business process outsourcing (BPO) workers in the Philippines resisting intensified AI-driven monitoring, entry-level engineers in India navigating technological displacement, and creative workers in the United States challenging generative AI systems trained on uncompensated labor.

These sites of struggle are no longer confronting entirely separate corporate actors or isolated systems of production. In different ways, they are confronting the expanding power of the same firms and the same underlying logic of accumulation. Increasingly, these struggles are also beginning to recognize one another and build forms of coordination across sectors and geographies, including through emerging transnational solidarity formations such as the Global Platform Workers Solidarity Project (GPWSP), which brings together tech and platform worker organizations from more than thirty countries.

These conflicts with major technology corporations are not confined to labor alone. Consumers are increasingly entering into conflict with these firms over questions of privacy, manipulation, fraud, surveillance, and accountability, from the European Union to the United States.

Lawsuits and public controversies have emerged around the extraction and sharing of personal data through AI systems and platform tracking technologies, while other cases have raised concerns over algorithmic targeting, scam advertising, addictive platform design, and the psychological harms associated with AI-driven systems. There is a growing recognition that the same infrastructures reshaping labor are also reorganizing communication, consumption, and everyday social life, often in deeply harmful ways.

Environmental struggles are also increasingly converging around these firms. Across regions, communities are resisting the expansion of data centers due to their enormous demands for land, energy, and water. From parts of the United States to India, local residents and farming communities have mobilized against data center projects linked to major technology firms, raising concerns over water depletion, environmental degradation, and the diversion of fertile land and public resources toward privately controlled technological infrastructure.

What emerges from these developments is a different political terrain from earlier periods of globalization. In earlier moments, environmental groups might have confronted oil corporations, labor unions challenged manufacturers, and consumer movements targeted entirely different industries and supply chains. Today, however, the same corporations increasingly sit at the center of labor exploitation, data extraction, environmental conflict, and consumer harm simultaneously. And in many respects, we are no longer entirely separate constituencies: workers, consumers, and citizens are often the same people experiencing interconnected forms of harm generated by the same corporations, as their pursuit of profit reshapes and worsens conditions across multiple aspects of social life.

This convergence creates the possibility of new forms of coordination across labor movements, consumer groups, environmental campaigns, and artists confronting the growing concentration of tech monopolies. Recent moments of solidarity around campaigns targeting Amazon, including the “Make Amazon Pay” mobilizations, have offered glimpses of this possibility, bringing together warehouse workers, garment workers, climate activists, artists, and public figures across multiple countries within a shared critique of the enormous economic and political power Amazon increasingly wields. While still partial and uneven, such mobilizations point toward the emergence of broader political coalitions that can confront these corporations across multiple terrains simultaneously.

The convergence of labor, consumer, and environmental struggles creates a strategic opportunity to reshape the balance of power between states and major technology corporations.

The national populations being integrated into digital platforms as workers, consumers, and citizens are increasingly experiencing multiple forms of harm generated by these platforms and their supply chains. States are increasingly confronting expanding and interconnected forms of social opposition directed at the same corporations — and, in the Global South, often at foreign corporations — many of which repeatedly seek to evade legal accountability and regulatory constraints in the countries from which they derive labor, data, markets, and profit.

The critical question, then, is how such corporate power can be confronted when capital operates transnationally. The answer cannot lie solely at the level of the nation-state. Acting individually, states remain vulnerable to capital flight, competitive undercutting, and infrastructural dependency. But acting collectively through regional blocs and coordinated regulatory frameworks may create different bargaining conditions.

This is not a new strategy. Historically, labor movements, postcolonial states, and regional formations repeatedly attempted to increase their bargaining power through collective negotiation, coordinated standards, and South-South solidarity, including through moments such as the Bandung Conference and the broader Non-Aligned Movement. Yet such efforts were frequently weakened by colonial and postcolonial economic hierarchies, debt dependency, external intervention, and the strategic interests of Global North powers seeking access to labor, markets, and natural resources in the Global South.

But today there may be new possibilities for strategic alignment between states across both the Global North and Global South. Governments are confronting many of the same tech firms over questions of taxation, labor protections, electoral manipulation, platform accountability, misinformation, data governance, and digital sovereignty. The growing tensions between European regulators and major American technology firms, alongside legal actions and public controversies emerging within the United States itself over AI harms, suggest that dissatisfaction with the growing power of these corporations is no longer confined to any single region or political bloc.

Also, these firms remain dependent on continued access to large consumer markets, data flows, cloud integration, labor pools, and public legitimacy around the world. The value of AI systems depends not only on technical infrastructure and model development but also on continuous access to enormous user ecosystems from which data, engagement, and market dominance can be extracted. As competition within the AI sector intensifies and technological costs begin to fall, maintaining access to these markets becomes even more critical for corporate profitability and long-term dominance.

This creates important leverage for states, particularly when acting collectively rather than individually. Regional blocs such as the African Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), like the European Union, may possess greater bargaining power than individual states when negotiating labor protections, taxation, data governance, and environmental standards with major technology firms — particularly when access to large regional consumer markets becomes conditional upon compliance with such standards.

If multiple regional blocs were to coordinate these approaches simultaneously, the ability of capital to simply relocate in search of weaker conditions would become significantly more constrained. The challenge, therefore, is to establish regional coordination and also to reactivate the international institutions and transnational frameworks capable of regulating concentrated corporate power at the scale at which it now operates, including ongoing efforts toward binding international frameworks on corporate accountability and business and human rights.

Regional coordination may also create possibilities that move beyond dependence on existing corporate infrastructures altogether. Individually, many states in the Global South may lack the financial and technological capacity to develop large-scale AI systems independently. But through pooled investment, shared research infrastructure, regional cloud systems, public digital frameworks, and collaborative model development, regional blocs may be able to build alternative technological ecosystems that are less dependent on a small number of dominant American firms.

Such approaches could also create space for AI development organized around different priorities from those currently dominant in corporate-led systems. Rather than models built primarily around surveillance, hypercommercialization, labor extraction, and platform monopolization, regional and publicly coordinated approaches could potentially prioritize public interest infrastructures, labor protections, environmental sustainability, democratic accountability, and broader social needs.

In many respects, the dynamics emerging around AI supply chains echo earlier histories of colonial and postcolonial extraction, in which labor and resources were systematically extracted from the Global South while ownership, technological control, and accumulation remained concentrated elsewhere. The struggle over AI, therefore, concerns not only technological innovation but whether these older hierarchies of dependency and extraction will simply be reproduced in digital form.

The present moment also differs in important ways from earlier phases of globalization, however. Technological development is unfolding within an increasingly multipolar world, amid growing tensions around climate change, extreme inequality, geopolitical conflict, and digital sovereignty. The question is not whether societies should reject AI but on what terms its development will occur, who will control it, and whose interests it will ultimately serve.

If states continue competing individually through weakening labor protections, giving regulatory concessions, and deepening their infrastructural dependency, existing inequalities are likely to intensify further, particularly at a moment when some technology corporations possess economic power exceeding that of many states themselves.

But the very concentration of power within a small number of predominantly American technology firms also creates the conditions for broader forms of resistance and coordination. Across movements and regions, workers, consumers, environmental groups, artists, researchers, and states are increasingly confronting a few large corporations over issues of labor, digital infrastructure, surveillance, extraction, and democratic control. This creates the possibility of broader coalitions capable of collectively negotiating standards and resisting corporate power. Those coalitions might also start to build alternative technological futures organized around different social priorities.

The future of AI is, therefore, not technologically predetermined. It will be shaped through political struggle. The current trajectory is neither inevitable nor irreversible, and the growing convergence of social and political struggles around these systems may yet alter the path along which AI is being developed.