Eric Schmidt of Google once said it would take 300 years to crawl and index all the digital information in the world. Thirty years later, Google has collected, structured, and ranked the planet’s data, establishing itself as the central hub of global information.
This process has been one of humanity’s long attempts to digitally capture the sum of its knowledge.
Around the same time, Facebook began copying humanity itself. It targeted not only personal attributes and relationships but even private exchanges, mapping them into a social graph that visualized how people are connected.
If Google drew the “map of knowledge,” Facebook drew the “map of human relationships.”
AI has bloomed on top of these vast copies. What AI seeks is not mere volume of data, but the ability to analyze accumulated information and transform it into insight. Value lies in that process of interpretation. For this reason, possessing more data no longer guarantees advantage—what matters now is the ability to understand and utilize it.
So, what becomes the next battleground?
After the maps of knowledge and human connection, what is the next domain to be replicated? One emerging answer lies in Nvidia’s current approach.
Nvidia is attempting to copy the Earth itself. Whether we call it a Digital Twin or a Mirror World, the company is trying to reconstruct the planet’s structure and dynamics within its own ecosystem.
It aims to simulate the movements of the physical world and overlay them with digital laws. This marks a departure from the information-based replication of earlier internet companies, moving instead toward the duplication of reality itself.
What lies ahead is a complete digital copy of Earth—and a new industrial ecosystem built upon it. In Nvidia’s envisioned world, cities, climates, and economies all become entities that can be simulated. Within that digital Earth, AI learns, reasons, and reconstructs. Humanity has moved from understanding the planet to recreating it.
Yet if we wish to honor diversity and generate more possibilities in parallel, what we will need are not one, but countless “worlds.” Rather than imitating a single correct reality, AI could generate multiple “world lines” that diverge under different conditions. We can imagine a future where AI compares these world lines and derives the most optimal outcome. Such a vision would require an immense foundation of computational power.
This is no longer a contest of information processing alone but a struggle over resources themselves. The question becomes how efficiently we can transform energy into computation.The industries that produce semiconductors and the infrastructures that generate and distribute energy will form the next field of competition.
Nvidia’s challenge is not about data but about the “replication of worlds”—a new scale of technological struggle, an attempt to rewrite civilization with the Earth itself as the stage.
