A country's AI power is actually limited by the 'glue' holding the chips together, not the chips themselves.
The global AI arms race focuses on acquiring high-end GPUs, but this research reveals the real bottleneck is 'packaging solvency'—the physical ability to interconnect those chips under extreme heat. If the interconnections are weak, a nation can own the world's best hardware and still have unusable, failing compute power.
A Physical Audit Protocol for GCC Sovereign AI Assets: Sovereign Compute Cannot Exceed Its Weakest Interconnect
SSRN · 6357000
<div> The binding constraint on sovereign AI compute has migrated from transistor-level fabrication to package-level interconnection. Advanced packaging, the physical integration of compute dies, high-bandwidth memory stacks, and interposer substrates through micro-bump arrays measured in tens of micrometers, is now the rate-limiting step in deliverable compute performance. Yet no standardized audit framework exists for evaluating packaging risk at the investment-committee level, particularly un