The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Revolution in Military Affairs: Artificial Intelligence || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

AI is working its way into just about every aspect of modern life. I mean, who didn't fall for that video of the bunnies jumping on the trampoline. But artificial intelligence might not be the game-changer in warfare that you think it is...at least not in the short term.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-revolution-in-military-affairs-artificial-intelligence

Hey, all, Peter Zine here. Come to you from Cassidy Arch. And where am I? Capital Reef National Park. Sorry, it's been a busy week. Today, we are going to close out the series on the Revolution and Military Technology as advances in automation and digitization and material science and energy transfer come together to remake how we fight.

And we're going to close out with something that you probably don't need to worry about. And that's artificial intelligence in war. The whole idea of AI is it can process. faster than we can't make decisions faster than we can and potentially target with lethality faster than we can. I don't think it's going to happen. The problem is that the semiconductor supply chain for the high-end chips that are capable of doing AI, and as a rule here, the cutting edge is going to be three nanometers and smaller.

Simply isn't going to be able to survive the de-globalization age. So any chips that are not made in the next relatively short period of time, no more than a single digit of years are really all we're going to have for a good long time. And that means that the machines that are going out and doing the fighting have to rely on something that is older, that is not capable of processing, and has to be linked back to something back home, either via wire or telemetry or some sort of radio communication. And that makes for a very different sort of beast. There are roughly 30,000 manufacturing supply chain steps that go into semiconductors, the high-end stuff. And there's about 9,000 companies involved in about half.

of those companies only make one product for one end user. There is literally thousands of single point failures, and it only takes a few of them to go offline for you to not be able to make the high-end chips at all. But the place that I think it's going to be most concentrated, the place where we're all going to feel it, the place where it's going to be obvious is going to be with the lithography.

Specifically, we are currently using something called extreme ultraviolet, which is done by a company called ASML out of the Netherlands, and they are the world leaders in all of this. There are other companies that do the fash, other than TSM in Taiwan, but the lithography can really only be done by the Dutch. And it's not like this is one company. This is a constellation of hundreds of companies. And every time one of them either has a generational change or goes public,

ASML basically sweeps them under the rug, absorbs them completely, puts the staff in different areas and puts it all under information lockdown. So there is no way to duplicate what they have. And so if you take this gangly supply chain that wraps the world and any part of that breaks, we can't do EUV at all. And that means functionally no chips that are worse than or better than six, seven or eight nanometers based on where you draw the line. We can still do something called deep ultraviolet, but extreme ultraviolet, it just becomes impossible. And that means that the best chips that we will have 10 years from now are going to be very similar to the best

chips we had 10 years ago. And that limits what we can do with any sort of technological innovation. For the purposes of the military, it becomes very, very truncated. Old weapons, like smart bombs and cruise missiles, actually don't use very sophisticated chips. 20-year-old chips are just fine. It's the high end of thinking, the processing. Anything that's more than guidance and requires a degree of decision-making, that is what's going to be off the table. So while I applaud all of us for having these conversations about the implications of AI, what it means for the workforce, what it means for culture, what it means for morality and legality, these are great conversations. It's very rare that we get ahead of the technology

in discussing what it can and can't do and start thinking about the implications for us as people. But I think we have some extra time because once this breaks, it's going to take us 15 to 20 years to rebuild it. And that was back before everything accelerated with the Chinese fall in the Trump administration. Now it's probably going to take longer. So have these discussions. I think that's great. but it's really probably going to be a problem for the 2050s.