• Digital oligarchy is the fastest growing consolidation of power, as the leading companies try to gain monopoly over the technologies they control. Outside of China, the Internet world is dominated by a handful of USA companies. | Related Megatrends: Technology; Work; Governance; Geopower
• The number of influential technology companies is expected to shrink from 70 in 2017 to 30 by 2030 and possibly 10 by 2050, increasing the digital oligarchy. 
• Over 95% of all bitcoins in circulation are owned by about 4% of the market (1% of the addresses control 50% of the entire market). | Related Megatrends: Technology; Work
• High concentration of R&D activity: the top 2,000 R&D corporations worldwide have their headquarters in just a few countries (mainly USA, Japan and China), own about 75% of global ICT-related patents, 55% of ICT-related designs and 75% of the IP5 patent families related to AI, and about 70% of their total R&D spending is concentrated in the top 200 firms. | Related Megatrends: Technology; Inequalities; Geopower; Security
• China has the top two of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2), of 93 petaflops and 33.9 petaflops respectively, followed by Switzerland, then 3 in the USA, 2 in Japan, and next 2 also USA being the top 10. However, the U.S.A. might regain its top spot with a Department of Energy funding to six companies for the development of the world’s first exascale supercomputer (processing a quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second).
• EU is developing 8 supercomputers to be operational at mid-2020. They will be hosted at eight centres across the EU. Three of them, precursor to exascale machines (capable of executing more than 150 million billion calculations per second) will be among the top 5 supercomputers of the world. The other 5 will be petascale machines (capable of executing at least 4 Petaflops, or 4 million billion operations per second).
  | Related Megatrends: Geopower; Inequalities; Security
• China accounts for 44% of worldwide M2M (machine-to-machine) sim card subscriptions – three times the share of the USA.
  ​| Related Megatrends: Inequalities; Geopower; Security
• China aims to become world leader in science and innovation by 2050. In 2017, China's R&D spneding of about $378.6 billion (PPP) accounted for 21% of total world R&D expenditure, with the rate of R&D investment growth significantly exceeding that of the U.S. and the EU.
• China plans to be world leader in AI by 2030. Its R&D intensity might match that of OECD by 2020.
  | Related Megatrends: Geopower; Security; Inequalities;
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