World Bank President: Data Centers Not Viable for Emerging Markets

Banga's framing puts a hard constraint on the assumption that AI infrastructure will diffuse globally on its own. If power and compute economics genuinely rule out data centers across emerging markets, the geography of AI capacity becomes a development question, not just a commercial one — and the trade-off he names, scarce energy split between AI and basic needs, is the crux. What follows matters: whether multilateral institutions treat that gap as a mandate or a market failure, and whether the regions in question build alternatives or remain consumers of compute hosted elsewhere.