Long Story Short

This week on Devex’s Global Progress in the AI Era podcast, we are breaking down the critical shift from simply accessing artificial intelligence to owning the infrastructure it runs on, with a specific focus on how the global south can finance AI infrastructure on its own terms. From the push for "minimum viable compute" to the deployment of micro data centers, we explore how nations are moving away from being mere sites of data extraction toward becoming sovereign architects of their own technological destinies. To dig into these stories, Devex’s Catherine Cheney is joined by Jonathan Reid, Barbados minister of innovation; Kate Kallot, founder and CEO of Amini; and Alaa Murabit, managing partner at 500 Global. As the conversation around AI often centers on the massive "gigawatt factories" of the global north, our guests argue that the real bottleneck isn’t computing capability, but institutional capacity and the underlying financing architecture. We discuss the transition from short-term pilots to durable