Leadership, Work and Organisation Research Seminar – Dr Adam Badger
Title: Monopolies, Markets, and Minerals: Exploring the AI Supply Chain
Date: Wednesday 25 November 2026
Time: 15:00 to 16:30
Venue: NUBS.2.03
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link
Monopolies, Markets, and Minerals: Exploring the AI Supply Chain
Speaker: Dr Adam Badger
Dr Adam Badger is a lecturer in Economic Geography at Newcastle University. His work focuses on the intersections between technology and our working lives. He is committed to building research that combines the grass roots understandings of lived experience with large, top-down perspectives on markets and the global economy. He works at the intersection of Geography and Business studies – a trend that began in his PhD work on the gig economy (supervised across a business school and a geography department) and carried through to his research agenda on AI today.
Abstract:
Where does AI actually come from? Like all great questions, the answer is at once both simple, and complex. This talk presents research by Adam Badger and colleagues that tries to make sense of this question. On the one hand, the AI space is dominated by a handful of giants of the contemporary global economy that together run a near monopoly on the supply of AI chips and hardware – NVIDIA provide 95% of the global GPU market; TSMC make 90% of the chips used globally in AI systems, and these chips are in turn built on a machine that only one company in the world – ASML – manufacture. But investigations into these companies’ reports and filings leaves the trail going cold.
The minerals that are used to build these systems are drawn from all over the globe – some estimates place up to 70% of deposits on indigenous lands – and details of the supply chain remain murky. The human hands that build AI are rendered invisible by the very systems they create – among other things, smooth, frictionless chatbots. A developer working for OpenAI in the UK earned an average of £790,000GBP in basic salary, rising to £2,318,181 when shares and stock options are factored into the equation. The average employee. Meanwhile, millions of workers across the global south toil for pennies to enter data that really makes these systems work.
Out of this contradiction and confusion defined at every stage by feast and famine – boom or bust; near monopoly and sky high salaries on the one side, and a fractured supply chain and tiny gig payments on the other – this work presents an holistic approach to understanding the supply chain of AI as comprised of four interlocking, but distinct spheres. AI Infrastructure, AI Preparation, AI Deployment and E-Waste. It is an inescapable fact that we now exist in a world where tech and AI works for the profit and benefit of 8 billionaires, rather than 8 billion people. As scholars, we are not just distant observers of this phenomenon. We can intervene. But to do so, we’ve got to understand what we’re intervening into. This paper provides the groundwork for one way of seeing AI through the lens of the supply chains as a complete, planetary whole melding business, policy, people, planet and materials together.