Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

A decade ago, Amazon seemed to be ushering in a beautiful future. Its golden child, Alexa, was one of those moments that Arthur C. Clarke famously described: where a new technology becomes “indistinguishable from magic”. It appeared to herald a new age of artificial intelligence. But that was a whole earlier generation of technologies. Today, Alexa feels like a tired novelty — the technology never evolved as Amazon had envisioned, and the company has been forced into a game of catch-up. Now, with news that it is buying its way into the OpenAI ecosystem with a $10 billion stake in the emerging powerhouse, the strategy has taken a new turn.

That $10 billion buys some shares, of course. But more importantly from Amazon’s perspective, OpenAI will be using Amazon’s in-house chips on some of its output.

Amazon manufactures two chips via an in-house startup, Annapurna Labs. One, Trainium, is designed specifically for the heavy lifting of training AI models. Training chips are state-of-the-art and remain the area where Nvidia has a major technical advantage. But its second, Inferentia, is designed for user queries.

Inferentia specialises in queries where the big AI producers have become the most price-sensitive. In very loose terms, it costs about $4 an hour to run a top-end Nvidia chip. That isn’t much, unless one receives hundreds of millions of queries a day. In the future, as these chips take ever more strain, and as the cost of electricity remains static, it will be those marginal differences in price per query that drive big chip purchases. On that score, Amazon has a stable, low-energy chip that is hardly the best, but which keeps on trucking.

The story that Amazon wants to tell from this deal is that “OpenAI uses our stuff.” That allows the company to sell to product managers across the globe and crank up the revenues. It also supports the kinds of chip sales volumes it will need to finance the R&D for the next generation of chips. And it means Amazon will be learning more than ever in the process, given the sheer quantity of users OpenAI has.

Put that together with what the organisation already does with AWS — sell computing time rather than computing chips — and you have a powerful back end for any business. A company with a huge global footprint, rock-solid infrastructure, and proprietary chips sounds seductive to most IT managers.

In a sense, this is everyone’s strategy now. AI is increasingly turning into a monster when it comes to infrastructure pipelines, and no one wants to end up beholden to anyone. Nvidia’s total dominance of this phase, and frustration with its rollout, has accelerated that decision for many companies.

The biggest corporations — those who can compete with the billion-dollar cost of training a model and the multi-billion-dollar cost of chip development — are integrating their own workflows right back to the factory, and walling off from the supply chain. Meta is making its own chips; Google now chiefly runs Gemini on its own processors; Apple launched Apple Silicon five years ago.

Nvidia’s head start won’t be obliterated, even by a company as big as Amazon. In five years’ time, it will probably still be driving the market. The overall pie will continue to grow, bloating its balance sheet. But potential work that might have gone to Google, Meta or Amazon will have been stealthily brought in-house. And Amazon will likely be selling cloud services at a price no one else can match.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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