Malthusianism for computers.
Moore's law is dead. The only way to increase compute is to increase the power we feed to computers. AI is just the shiniest example. Everything else will follow suit until electricity costs increase enough that it doesn't make sense to throw any more computation at it.
Any country that doesn't have energy to spare will be in the position of countries which didn't have food to support armies before the industrial revolution.
Interesting point. I can see this could turn out to be true.
If we needed, for example, 1000 TWH to power AI for a huge drone swarm but could not do it while China could, this would be problematic.
It requires a future where MAD with nuclear weapons is obsolete though, with some futuristic new missile defense tech. I don't see that happening until some currently unknown physics makes it possible.