Centering global majority voices from the 85% of the global population from non-White backgrounds, this volume examines how communities from Istanbul to Tehran to São Paulo are building alternative AI models, contesting data extraction, and reclaiming digital sovereignty through practices ranging from state-led LLM development to grassroots memory archives.

This edited collection questions the ongoing dominance of debates about artificial intelligence, data governance, and digital futures. While Silicon Valley and Brussels set the terms for global technology discourse, billions of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are developing their own responses to datafication-responses shaped by distinct histories, values, and power relations. This volume documents these alternative trajectories. It examines how Türkiye builds state-led language models to assert technological sovereignty, how China's multilingual AI investments reshape global linguistic hierarchies, and how Iran navigates AI development under sanctions and authoritarian control. It traces material infrastructures-from undersea cables linking North Cyprus to Türkiye's networks, to data centers in Algeria asserting postcolonial sovereignty.

This book also illuminates resistance from below: Brazilian researchers training AI to detect climate disasters using citizen-generated data, Turkish women workers creating community-controlled digital memory archives, independent musicians negotiating algorithmic platform power, and youth co-designing mental health data initiatives. It reveals how everyday technologies-cookie consent banners, religious apps, Wikipedia editing-become sites of struggle over who controls data and for what purposes.

Combining ethnography, policy analysis, technical audits, and participatory research across sixteen chapters, the volume offers scholars, policymakers, technologists, and activists concrete alternatives to Western-centric frameworks. At a moment when AI regulation and data governance are being contested globally, this collection demonstrates that technological futures need not replicate colonial hierarchies-and that the Global Majority is already building different paths forward.