In my recent book, The Widening Turn, I refer to an emerging “multipolar” world. But that term is actually out of date.
In the summer of 2024, diplomat Charles W. Freeman offered the following corrective—
A new world order is coming into being. Many call it ‘multipolar,’ but it is better described as ‘multi-nodal.’ A ‘pole’ is the end of a line between two points. But the emerging order is a three-dimensional network, not a two-dimensional axis, or even a collection of axes. ‘Nodes’ are places where many connections of diverse sizes and intensities originate, terminate, and intersect on differing vectors. Multi-nodal is a more accurate depiction of the geopolitical geometry that is now emerging.
As I suggested in The Widening Turn, we’re moving into a 3D world, both geopolitically and technologically. That is, Freeman’s conceptual framework of geopolitical geometry also evokes a world morphing into an immersive global neural network, with AI lighting-up new nodes of interaction where nations and enterprises reshape the international landscape in profound ways.
From Training to Inference
Even in the wake of the DeepSeek earthquake in January, 2025, governments and big tech firms continue to pour money into AI believing that an emerging network of relationships across a multi-nodal world demands it.
As Christopher Mims explains in The Wall Street Journal, AI technology is shifting away from conventional LLMs and toward reasoning models and AI agents that consume many times more resources, in terms of both microchips and electricity.
“DeepSeek,” suggests Mims, “caused a panic of sorts because it showed that an AI model could be trained for a fraction of the cost of other models, something that could cut demand for data centers and expensive advanced chips. But what DeepSeek really did was push the AI industry even harder toward resource-intensive reasoning models, meaning that computing infrastructure is still very much needed.”
In other words, as demand shifts from training AI models toward running reasoning models (“inference”), products like AI agents and deep research will be needing lots more computing power. And that’s pressing governments and big tech firms across the world to invest in lots of data center infrastructure.
The bet here is that “over the course of the coming decade, the amount of demand for AI models could go up by a factor of a trillion or more, thanks to reasoning models and rapid adoption.”
AI is now multi-nodal AI. And it’s a geopolitical as well as a technological issue.
A Multidimensional World
Meanwhile, the days of the United States playing hyper-powered world policeman are gone. We’re returning to something more akin to the Westphalian system based on sovereign states, each with their own nodes of power, influence, and soon, crackling AI infrastructure. To the shock of many, realism is returning to American foreign policy as the new administration reorients itself to a wholly new kaleidoscopic geopolitical reality.
After all, the race to innovate across geopolitical nodes—a matrix of interacting, unequal units pursuing their own interests—is intensifying, with the United States and China leading the global dance in a quickening pas de deux across the world stage.
And so…
One minute it’s OpenAI releasing ChatGPT in the United States… the next minute it’s DeepSeek releasing its R1 reasoning model in China….
As Palantir brings Grok to the enterprise… Tencent’s WeChat starts integrating DeepSeek’s open-source AI model into its search function….
And one day China’s Alibaba Group says it will release its own AI reasoning model built on the company’s flagship AI foundation model, Qwen2.5-Max, and announces plans to invest at least 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over the next three years in cloud computing and AI infrastructure… and a few days later it’s learned that, “Meta Platforms is in talks to build a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence endeavors that would dwarf anything the company has done to date and would be among the biggest of its kind.”
The relationship between technology and geopolitics is becoming more complicated.
The world is a burning platform of change.
Every Day an Emergency
By its very nature, a multi-nodal world feels less stable and fundamentally performative. This is a global digital theater, where all the world’s a stage, involving great powers, big tech firms, and ambitious AI startups; and while citizens are buffeted by headlines from the Crisis News Network (CNN), innovation roars ahead.
While chaos creates opportunity, drama-driven plot-twists abound. The dynamic of a world synchronized around emerging tech redounds to the benefit of the larger innovation ecosystem even as it leaves individuals increasingly confused….
OpenAI releases ChatGPT… so Sundar Pichai declares a “Code Red”…
DeepSeek releases its R1 reasoning model… so Mark Zuckerberg organizes a series of “War Rooms”…
America pursues a new direction in foreign policy, so French President Emmanuel Macron calls an “Emergency Meeting” in Paris… immediately followed by… another Emergency Meeting in Paris.
Time is accelerating and human beings are scrambling to keep up.
The world, said Heraclitus, is a living fire.
Our Multi-Nodal Funhouse Mirror
Meantime, war—or the prospect of it—becomes the father of fresh ideas. Oftentimes it disorients us through fear, while innovating through urgency. And it’s firing-up intense competition across a networked world hungry for profits.
In Europe, a blueprint for the future of European defense is expected to be proposed by the European Commission in mid-March, as pressure grows to float euro bonds and pry open EU deficit rules to pay for increased defense spending.
In America, the CEOs of Palantir and Anduril grab headlines with breathless, operatic arias about China’s plans to rule the world. And the Pentagon cheers. “As part of a broader shift in acquisition philosophy,” a senior defense official told Defense One, “the Pentagon may combine parts of several innovation-fostering offices into a new one focused on buying cutting-edge products from companies.”
Fear launches a thousand ships. And as DOGE tech bros storm the battlements of the American government to clear the way for more innovation, Xi Jingping utters a call to arms to China’s tech community at a symposium in Beijing. ”The private sector enjoys broad prospects and great potential on the new journey in the new era,” Xi proclaimed. “It is a prime time for private enterprises and entrepreneurs to give full play to their capabilities.”
Alas, it’s an exhilarating but potentially dangerous global dance. Everybody’s moving fast to break things. Is it any accident that regions of the world with huge reserves of the minerals essential to modern technology are being devasted by war? Minerals like cobalt, coltan, and lithium are needed for everything from smartphones and computers to electric vehicles.
As China, the United States and the European Union jockey for position in the natural resources-rich, conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to visit Washington for the signing of a “minerals deal.” Not to be outdone, Russian President Vladimir Putin works on his own possible deal to get U.S. companies back into Russia, enabling access to trillions of dollars worth of natural resources including rare earth metals… with aluminum being the most immediate opportunity.
Such is the hall of mirrors of a multi-nodal world, glittering like tinfoil, where we all, in a sense, dance to the tune of conflict under a disco ball of accelerating tech. A global system flickering with a weird combination of ambition and paranoia favors the bold, the entrepreneurs, the improvisers, the showmen.
In the multi-nodal funhouse mirror, the defense sector and consumer economy morph into one.
As Peter Diamandis reminds us, “COMPETITION fosters INNOVATION!”
The Show Goes On
In January, 2025, as America watched much of the Los Angeles landscape burn, Hollywood’s longstanding resistance to Donald J. Trump was also incinerated. Trump made his return to power like a modern day Elvis giving it another go in Las Vegas. The ultimate showman was back, an American mirror reflecting back onto America all our wild ambitions, all our crazy ideas.
What could be more American than that? Like it or not, he’s a Man of our Times (“Oh, he’s burning bright…”).
Which could mean that American-fueled globalization is cooked. The words of the new Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, hit the D.C. Establishment like a blowtorch: “It’s not normal,” said Rubio, “for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That… was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.”
As Washington, D.C.’s foreign policy elite fume in their K Street bunkers, a deep familiarity with Trump’s brand of unpredictable American showmanship breeds deep contempt in the news media….
“President Trump,” says The Wall Street Journal, “has dramatically shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy in four short weeks, making the U.S. a less reliable ally and retreating from global commitments in ways that stand to fundamentally reshape America’s relationship with the world.”
For The New York Times editorial board, every day is a five-alarm fire because, “In effect, Mr. Trump and his administration are pivoting U.S. foreign policy 180 degrees.”
Yes, indeed. We’re watching the United States take a wide, wild turn on the international dance floor that’s also a glittering hall of mirrors through which Donald Trump struts to the beat of a multi-nodal world.
Columnist David French watches all this and is utterly aghast: “This state of affairs is unrecognizable to most Americans,” he insists. “But Putin recognizes it. So does Xi Jinping. In Trump, they can plainly see a version of themselves.”
Trump Terror: Break-out the Straitjackets
But it’s the Europeans who seem particularly blown away by the whirlwind of our Trumpian wildfire. French president Emmanuel Macron called Trump’s new approach to dealing with Europe and ending the Ukraine war… “electroshock.” The German Ambassador to the United States insists Trump has a “maximum disruption” agenda.
This year’s Munich Security Conference went into full meltdown mode when its outgoing chairman, German diplomat Christoph Heusgen, took to the podium and succumbed to fear and tears. "It is clear that our rules-based international order is under pressure," he cried. “This order is easy to disrupt, it's easy to destroy.”
As investor Ken Fisher observed, “I’ve discovered how much… absolute Trump terror overwhelms Europeans—hugely more than was measurable in December. It is shockingly so, almost beyond words. Since the US election, they have become extraordinarily pessimistic. It is as if they were MSNBC commentators, only without the occasional smiles and jokes.”
Alas, it’s as if the Europeans have been reading too much Bertolt Brecht. “To those who do not know that the world is on fire,” said the dour German playwright, “I have nothing to say.”
A Multi-Nodal Combinatorial Explosion
But what of it, Mr. Brecht?
Long before Trump returned to power, the global drive for innovation was already providing a sense of instability and profound change. Alas, everything about Donald Trump—rising like a phoenix from the flames—suggests that stability is for the birds. Change demands chaos. Trump, like the rest of us, is simply along for the ride.
The new world order is in 3D, with emerging, disorienting nodes creating new connections across a network abuzz with potential. Disruptive new vectors are being activated. We can fear the consequences of this frantic global competition, but we can also imagine the possibilities of a multi-nodal world that is all aflame with the ambition to innovate like never before.
The words of venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson seem appropriate here: “From this conceptual base, come the origin of economic growth and accelerating technological change, as the combinatorial explosion of possible idea pairings grows exponentially as new ideas come into the mix…. It is about to go into overdrive.”
Sparks light-up our multi-modal reality with elver-gleams of innovation in an unceasing process of creative destruction.
Disruptive innovation is all the rage. And Trump?
He’s just the most glaringly obvious signal that there’s no going back.
Technological Realpolitik
So what’s all this craziness actually mean for organizations? Paradoxically, when it comes to organizations managing change and creating impact, it’s not about obsessing over technology. The more fantastic technology becomes, the more grounded its application has to be. Call it a kind of technological realpolitik befitting our Exponential Age. As with the rise of increasingly assertive nations across the world and the turn in American foreign policy that it’s prompted, organizational reinvention in a multi-nodal world demands a kind of pragmatic realism.
For instance, in the words of one U.S. defense official, “This [Trump] administration cares about weapon systems and business systems and not ‘technologies.’ We're not going to be investing in ‘artificial intelligence’ because I don’t know what that means. We're going to invest in autonomous killer robots.” It’s not about how cool the tech is, in other words… what matters is the effects it has on the battlefield.
Is this sentiment so different from the consumer economy? According to PWC’s 26th Annual Global CEO Survey, CEOs “plan to continue systematically integrating AI throughout their businesses, including tech platforms (47%), business processes and workflows (41%), workforce and skills (31%) and core business strategy (24%).”
PWC goes on to claim that, “During this period of disruption, tech innovation will reign supreme. Management teams capable of creatively disrupting themselves with highly effective, intelligent offerings are positioned to win in increasingly competitive markets. Whole categories of business will be invented.” For TrendzOwl, that might be true, but in today’s fast-moving multi-nodal world, organizations had best prioritize reality over abstractions and tech showmanship.
The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is perhaps the most relevant case in point. The great paradox being generated by our multi-nodal world is present here too. While the kinds of services BPO firms can offer are widening as the universe of interactions expands, success is not so much about pitching technology as it is about driving outcomes.
As such, the following perspective of TP Deputy CEO and CEO-designate Thomas Mackenbrock sounds a lot like that of the aforementioned practical-minded American defense official—
Today, thanks to the ‘triad’ (humans, AI copilots that augment human work, and AI agents that replace human work), the company (TP) can replace ever more complex front and back-office tasks. Will the trend of increasing employment at call centers continue, then, as AI adoption increases? ‘I honestly don’t know,’ Mackenbrock said. ‘But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is driving outcomes for the client.’
This is akin to the defense sector aligning efforts to achieve maximum effect and efficiency because competition in a multi-nodal world demands value realization.
And while TP has launched a new investment program in AI partnerships with a target of €100 million in 2025 as part of its growth strategy aimed at accelerating the development of AI and reinventing digital business services, after TP’s 2024 earnings call on February 27, 2025, Chief Financial Officer Olivier Rigaudy noted that, "There are a lot of technologies out there, but often the key challenge is how to scale these technologies and we have the global distribution.”
This rhymes with the general sense of growing pressure CFOs are putting on their colleagues to demonstrate a return from AI purchases. It seems AI startups that build tools for enterprises are having more conversations with potential customers that involve a CFO. Oftentimes, those CFOs are driving more of those conversations than CIOs and CTOs.
“Today,” says co-founder of an AI startup called Writer, Waseem Alshikh, “the focus is on ROI, less on model names or sizes. Instead, [customers] prioritize secure, transparent and scalable solutions that deliver a positive return on investment.” AI customers want the stuff to work. The focus is on the bottom-line. Outcomes.
And while it’s been an interesting few years for the BPO industry, and there are sure to be plot-twists going forward, year-to-date, TP stock is outperforming Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia… even the headline-hungry Palantir.
In 2025, time is moving too fast for tech firms to keep up. Investor Ken Fisher provides another counter-intuitive fact reflected in the hall of mirrors that is today’s financial markets:
And, so, European stocks are too depressed and, also but less so, most non-US markets. So, most, but of course not all, are quietly beating the S&P 500 year to date. Britain, Germany and Israel have actually hit new all-time highs in 2025…. You doubt me? OK, but it is happening right in front of your eyes. Grab your iPhone. Use its normal Apple News stock market app to look up the S&P 500, the Nasdaq composite, and MSCI Europe. There it is. Europe leads.
Remember… in a kaleidoscopic multi-nodal world, things are not always what they seem. According to analytics firm EPFR, during the third week of February, Europe-focused equity funds recorded their biggest inflow since early 2022.
The financial markets are always unpredictable. Anything can happen, and often does. But it’s worth considering what The Wall Street Journal proposes: “Donald Trump’s election victory was seen as the swan song for long-struggling European assets. Investors are now betting it could actually be the opposite…. What is special about this European rally, however, is that it doesn’t just appear to reflect a bounce from the bottom, but a more durable transformation. This is what Mizuho strategist Jordan Rochester has dubbed the MEGA, or ‘Make Europe Great Again,’ trade.”
Generating Interactions Across a Sovereign World
Durable transformation could mean that global enterprises like TP—a firm that interacts with a huge percentage of the world’s population through various digital channels every day—are uniquely positioned for a multi-nodal reality as the AI revolution spins forward chasing more and more global interactions… tariffs and sanctions be damned.
Because even with walls seeming to become more formidable between nations, the AI revolution means distinct pockets of change will be happening everywhere all at once across global nodes. The global push for “data sovereignty” (making sure the data used in AI systems is stored within national borders) also referred to as “sovereign AI,” will continue to drive change across our multi-nodal world order. And as TP knows well, in the case of the BPO industry, robust cybersecurity capabilities will be a competitive differentiator.
Because hyper-scaling is continuing across a networked, though increasingly sovereign, world. Take Salesforce’s Hyperforce project as an example. Some time ago, the company set about rewriting the code for its applications, databases and other operating systems in order to run on an assortment of clouds. Why undertake such an initiative? “Developing Hyperforce was necessary because many of Salesforce’s customers live in countries with laws that require software providers to store data about their citizens on servers situated in those countries…. Bringing Hyperforce to other cloud providers can also let Salesforce compete for business in new geographical regions without incurring the expenses of servers and data center leases.”
Or take the telecommunications space as another example. According to Chris Penrose, Nvidia’s Global Head of Business Development for Telco, telcos have been among the fastest movers when it comes to adopting generative AI, and this will help advance sovereign AI across the multi-nodal network—
… there have been 14 telcos around the world that have gone public about their intention to offer AI infrastructure in their markets, to address sovereign AI and to really support the AI agenda for their nations. That's pretty interesting because telcos are obviously trusted partners to the government—some of them are owned partially or even fully by the government. But many nations around the globe are beginning to say, what do we need to do to make sure we're participating in this generative AI revolution, and how do we have the right infrastructure in our nation to do it?
Penrose goes on. “Not only do countries want to make sure they're doing the right thing for their society, but there's also a need for the government and how they want to apply all these technologies. And if you look around the corpus of potential, true sovereign players in a country, telcos are the champions of infrastructure and industry in their countries and are a trusted partner in that space. So there's definitely a big piece around the sovereignty side.”
Nothing as it Seems
Clearly, our emerging 3D geopolitical reality is becoming more complex, increasingly chaotic. And while some headlines would have us believe the struggle for technological supremacy between China, the United States, and other nodes leaves no room for accommodation between competitors, in reality, the economic interplay is far more complicated. Nothing is quite as it seems. Intense competition creates considerable opportunity. As Ambassador Chas Freeman points out—
In the emerging, unfamiliar international system, countries interact and connect with each other in a multidimensional—not just a bilateral context—and in multiple, often inconsistent, ways. A nation may have poor political relations or military confrontations with countries with which it nonetheless has a lot of economic interdependence…. We will see more of this sort of complexity in relationships in future.
The emerging world order is always being renegotiated and redefined. Just ask the Brits, who seem particularly disoriented these days. As the United States and Russia headed to Riyadh last week to discuss possibilities for collaboration, the British Establishment cried foul. The idea that, in Secretary Rubio’s words, “potentially historic economic partnerships” could produce “incredible opportunities” between Washington and Moscow had London livid.
But the Brits might remind themselves what author Peter Ackroyd explains in his book about early England, Foundation—“Trade is the key to the growth of civilizations. Trade is the motor of wars. Trade fosters technologies.” Trade, in other words, is a force all its own. It’s always complex. It’s never been static. It’s always on the move.
And when you think of it, companies aren’t so different from countries in that competitors are also collaborators… even more so in a multi-nodal world of accelerating opportunity. We can return to Salesforce for an immediate example. The company needs to rent servers from cloud firms in different regions of the world where it doesn’t have enough business to justify running its own data centers. It needs secure arrangements less prone to outages so that it can run its customer management, AI agents, and other applications as it chases more and more interactions.
Meantime, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has had many harsh criticisms of one of those prospective cloud firm partners, Microsoft, that include accusations that Microsoft violated antitrust laws in how it sells its software bundles. Benioff also has offered scathing critiques about how clunky and inaccurate Microsoft’s AI chabot is.
“But,” points out The Information, “that history hasn’t stopped Salesforce from including Microsoft in negotiations it is having with several cloud providers—also including Google and Oracle—about a major new cloud agreement… The deal is likely to be worth more than $1 billion over several years.” While it’s true that Salesforce ultimately chose Google Cloud and AWS to partner with, the point remains apt.
If Salesforce negotiating with Microsoft over cloud servers sounds a bit like Trump negotiating with Putin over Ukraine, we should understand that realism in business and geopolitics will reach new, unprecedented levels in a multi-nodal reality. We can also return to the telecommunications industry for another immediate example. Just look at what’s happening in the telco space as AI becomes a more significant piece of telcos’ businesses—an increasingly networked world makes partnerships and alliances more essential than ever.
Consider the big announcement TMobile made in the past year that it will be working with both Ericsson and Nokia to port their software stacks onto Nvidia's accelerated compute and GPU compute so that they can offer AI and RAN at the same time. As it happens, “there's a significant upside opportunity for those that are going to lean in to grab it, and it can be a very meaningful portion of their business as they go forward.”
But for the best example of particularly high levels of tension between opportunistic entities chasing more and more global interactions, look no further than the troubled relationship between Apple and Qualcomm. “The two have feuded for years and years and remain shackled to each other for complicated reasons like royalties and patent disputes.” Indeed—
The animosity has only intensified in recent years as Apple has made moves to develop its own technology, which would reduce its reliance on Qualcomm’s wireless modems, an essential part of many Apple devices. Huge dollars are at stake: Business with Apple amounts to nearly a quarter of Qualcomm’s annual revenue, and if Apple can break away from Qualcomm, the iPhone maker will save billions of dollars in manufacturing costs.
This looks to be a grueling and expensive negotiation. The issue of patent fees alone seems intractable, because success for Apple “assumes Apple can get Qualcomm to agree to negotiate on the latter’s patent fees when their current contract expires in March 2027. Analysts are doubtful it will be a peaceful process, given the history of litigation and bad blood between them. They predict that if Apple sues Qualcomm again, it could become the costliest intellectual property fight in history.”
This all sounds a lot like the relationship between China and the United States… or perhaps negotiations between the United States and Russia over Ukraine.
The Relentless Pursuit of Self-Interest
Such is the context for President Trump signing an Executive Order removing barriers to American leadership in AI while turning to Elon Musk to help him drive American tech forward. But Musk isn’t the only tech bro in the White House’s conga line, because “a significant cohort of staff from other Valley firms are assuming outsize roles in the Trump administration as well. In fact, you could practically call this the Andreessen Horowitz administration.”
One early Roblox employee named John Shedletsky even took to X to insist that “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”
What a whirlwind. For enterprises, the pursuit of more and more global interactions proceeds apace. And as America pushes through the crowded dancefloor in search of securing its place in the world, the multi-nodal order spins out endless new dance moves in ever accelerating revolutions. As such, it creates fierce competition but also reveals opportunities for cooperation, as different actors pursue their own interests.
Rivalries and alliances spin past in a blur.
Discerning the Future
Exactly eight years ago this month, in 2017, I was in Maastricht, the Netherlands with TP, pondering the theme of exponential change, trying to discern the future of the BPO industry. Back then, TP leadership seemed confident that in the world of massive interconnection that awaited us, “companies will turn to Teleperformance to help them manage the rise of new technologies and all the new communications needs that will come with them.”
Today, the multi-nodal world order is much more kaleidoscopic. It’s a significantly more chaotic collection of global relationships across a more networked world. And the process of change and negotiation is ongoing. The more connections that light up various nodes, the more vectors there are for possible idea-pairings and sometimes counter-intuitive possibilities. The examples of emerging communications needs seem endless…
And so we watch as AI startups rely on enterprise software firms to reach new customers even as those software firms, in the words of The Information, “need the AI firms to stay relevant as more customers develop custom AI applications for their employees.” Witness database provider Snowflake expanding its existing partnership with Microsoft to let Snowflake customers access OpenAI’s artificial intelligence directly from the Azure cloud service. It’s not unlike a similar deal Snowflake struck with OpenAI rival Anthropic.
Snowflake’s latest financial results show that investors think the company is well-positioned to benefit as more companies build AI-powered applications based on the data they generate. We shouldn’t be surprised… because a multi-nodal hall of mirrors lights-up a host of new industry-specific opportunities.
Recall the words of Chas Freeman: “Nodes’ are places where many connections of diverse sizes and intensities originate, terminate, and intersect on differing vectors. Multi-nodal is a more accurate depiction of the geopolitical geometry that is now emerging.”
If Elon Musk is correct, and “We are on the event horizon of the singularity,” then an utterly disoriented news media’s collective multi-nodal nervous breakdown is understandable.
But we should also understand that the forces driving geopolitical turmoil transcend the drama surrounding Donald J. Trump.
Image credit: from the “Drawing From Experience” blog by Dave Hamlin
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