India Signs Pax Silica Declaration, Joining US-Led Silicon & AI Supply-Chain Bloc

Great-power coalitions built around a single strategic commodity have precedent: the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance to secure coaling stations, the 1941 U.S.-UK Lend-Lease network for war materiel, and the 1973 International Energy Agency—each sought to turn a chokepoint resource into collective leverage. Pax Silica echoes this logic, treating transistors and GPUs as the new oil. It formalises a decade-long trend—visible since the 2018 U.S. export controls on Huawei and the 2022 chip sanctions on Russia—where compute capacity, not just hydrocarbons, defines national power hierarchies. India’s adhesion matters because it shifts the centre of gravity of the non-Chinese supply chain toward the Global South; if New Delhi realises even a fraction of its planned ten fabs and rare-earth corridors, the bloc could erode China’s 60 % share of processing by mid-2030s. Yet history warns that cartels can ossify: OPEC’s cohesion frayed within fifteen years, and the post-war dollar order now strains under multipolar finance. Whether Pax Silica endures the next century will depend less on today’s declarations than on sustained capital flows, ecological constraints of energy-hungry data centres, and the alliance’s ability to offer inclusive governance rather than merely replicate earlier core-periphery dependencies.