In the summer of 1845, John O'Sullivan, a magazine editor in New York, coined a phrase while writing in defense of annexing Texas: "Manifest Destiny." His argument was that it was inevitable providence — a destiny — for an expanding American people to fill the vast continent that heaven had granted them. Just three years later, after a war with Mexico, the United States acquired land amounting to 15% of its current territory for a mere $15 million. And as if on cue, gold soon began pouring out of California.
Now, 180 years later, a strikingly similar voice is being heard again over a new territory called AI. The AI Action Plan released by the White House in July last year defined "unchallenged global technological dominance" as a core element of national security. The logic is that whichever nation commands the largest AI ecosystem will set the world's standards. Security and industrial growth have simply taken the place once occupied by providence and population; the American framework that views expansion not as a choice but as an unavoidable necessity is remarkably identical.
The method of expansion is equally alike. In the 19th century, the key infrastructure that connected the American continent and created wealth was the railroad. The federal government handed railroad companies a generous 129 million acres of land, effectively free of charge, and as a result the 3,000 miles of track that existed in 1840 exploded to 115,000 miles within 40 years. Wherever iron rails were laid, people and capital followed. Today, the role once played by those railroads has been taken over by hyperscale data centers and power grids. Training and operating high-performance AI requires enormous data warehouses packed with hundreds of thousands of semiconductors. Running a single such facility consumes a vast amount of energy, comparable to the electricity consumption of a mid-sized city.
This is precisely why President Donald Trump wasted no time announcing Stargate, the mega-project jointly created by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, immediately after taking office. The plan calls for pouring an astronomical sum of up to $500 billion — about 700 trillion won in Korean currency — into AI data centers on U.S. soil over the next four years. The first forward base has been set in Abilene, Texas. The government is fast-tracking permits for power plants and transmission networks, boldly offering up federally owned sites, and using subsidies as an accelerator for semiconductor plants. Just as vast tracts of land were granted in the 19th century to draw in the railroads, electricity, land and sweeping subsidies are now being used to summon the world's AI computers onto American soil. As a result, three-quarters of the computing power of the world's top AI supercomputers is already concentrated within U.S. territory. Cutting-edge chips and overwhelming electricity have now replaced the land and gold mines of the past.
America's strategy for handling the world and its rivals has become far more meticulous and sophisticated. To allies, it sells "AI bundle products" that package the latest chips, data centers, models and security solutions together; to rival nations, it offers only semiconductors a generation behind in performance, under stringent conditions. The U.S. commerce secretary has gone so far as to say that it is strategically more advantageous to get rivals "addicted" to American technology than to block them completely. Instead of seizing territory outright, an era of selling inference algorithms and global standards has arrived. It differs in character from classical imperialism in that there is no bloodshed or ceding of land, but the essence of a modern-day technological mercantilism, in which the state puts private companies at the forefront, is clear. The reality that allies will face is no different either. In the end, whoever lays the tracks first and controls the infrastructure gets to set the price of fares and tolls.
So where should Korea drop its anchor amid these steep waves of technological hegemony? Taking on U.S. Big Tech head-on in a contest over large language model (LLM) parameters and capital scale is not a realistic answer. The solution must instead be found in the strengths we already hold in our hands. Korea boasts the world's highest manufacturing robot density and is a top-tier advanced manufacturing power where semiconductor, shipbuilding, automotive and battery plants come together. Text data on the internet may already have been swept up by U.S. Big Tech. But the industrial data pouring out in real time every day from the processes, equipment and quality control of our manufacturing floors still remains a vast, unclaimed bonanza.
The core direction we must decide on and seize without delay is clear.
First, there is an urgent need to systematically bundle fragmented factory data and layer it with rich context. Only then can the tacit knowledge of advanced manufacturing, accumulated over long years at the fingertips of skilled workers on the floor, be fully transplanted into AI. Contextualizing data must come first if we are to protect our sovereignty in the era of "physical AI."
In addition, even if we appropriately borrow outside solutions for general-purpose large models, we must hold onto our own proprietary technology in the manufacturing operating systems (OS) that actually run factories, edge AI chips and robot drive components.
Furthermore, we should boldly open up the advanced industrial complexes spread across the country — in Cheonan and Asan, Ulsan and Changwon — as a vast testing ground for physical AI. Innovative startups would verify their technology on-site, mid-sized manufacturers would gain dramatic productivity, and the experience accumulated this way would in turn become a powerful export product for the world. Strategic cooperation with the United States should be closely maintained, but "selective openness" — never handing over the keys of core data and on-site control — must be an iron rule.
In the face of the 19th-century tide of "Manifest Destiny," nations that failed to prepare in advance were helplessly absorbed into an order set by the United States. The essence of this great turning point of AI imperialism, arriving in a different era, will be no different. The difference is that this contest will be decided not in the virtual space inside a monitor, but in the rough world of physical reality. What Korea, as an advanced manufacturing power, must defend is not reliance on someone else's language model, but the intelligence of our own factories and industrial sites — in other words, "sovereign physical AI."
