What happens if Latin America bleeds Chinese tech
Brett Perlmutter is the founder and former head of Google Cuba. Michelle Caruso-Cabrera is the chief executive of MCC Global Enterprises and a CNBC contributor.
As U.S. warships patrol off the coast of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro, addressing a crowd, holds up a Huawei phone gifted to him by Xi Jinping and pretends to call up the Chinese leader. “Ni hao, xie xie,” he says in broken Mandarin.
Though it is no surprise that Maduro would pantomime a close friendship with Beijing, the gesture underlined just how much headway Chinese technology has made in Latin America. The consequences of China’s growing sway in the region must not be waved away, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
In Latin America, China has been steadily expanding its presence by extending loans, acquiring ports and buying up 5G networks. Beijing is said to be targeting $700 billion in trade with the region by 2035. Chinese technology firm Huawei has spent many years establishing a digital beachhead and is now preparing to pour a fortune into deploying its full AI stack — everything from massive data centers and chips optimized for AI workloads to its own foundational models. In July, Chilean copper-mining giant Codelco agreed to collaborate with Huawei on AI, cloud services and other technologies. Brazilian firms might follow suit. Meanwhile, ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is building a wind-powered data center in São Paulo.
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We have seen the stakes up close. One of us spent decades covering China’s efforts to make headway in Latin America. The other negotiated the first U.S.-Cuba internet infrastructure deals to offer Cubans an uncensored U.S. alternative to China’s government-sanctioned technology. In broad outlines, the story remains the same in the current era of AI: Alignment with American technologies safeguards digital sovereignty and individual rights, while alignment with Chinese standards encodes authoritarian norms. As Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger have cautioned, embedded AI infrastructure shapes societal behavior.
Choosing Chinese tech is not a neutral decision. It enables repression and creates political dependency. Authoritarian regimes that avail themselves of Chinese technology to stay in power remain tethered to Beijing. And the people of Latin America have already experienced the consequences. In Ecuador, the Chinese-built ECU 911 public safety system was misused to surveil and intimidate political opponents with facial recognition and AI analytics. Rights groups have flagged the perils of similar Chinese-built monitoring systems in Bolivia. And Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE helped Venezuela create the “fatherland identity card,” which helps track people’s medical records, voting history and more. Critics say opposition members were tracked and faced blowback, such as by having their government benefits adjusted.
