Omniscaler and new technological races: digital inequality in the context of transforming global competition

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to identify the role of omniscalers in new technological races and to explain how their ability to scale infrastructural, financial, innovation, and data advantages across multiple arenas generates new mechanisms of digital inequality under the transformation of global rivalry. The article argues that contemporary competition is shifting from rivalry over individual markets toward control over scaling infrastructures that enable data processing, computing capacity, digital integration, and the diffusion of new business models. In this context, omniscalers emerge as a new type of corporate actor capable of transferring accumulated advantages across several arenas of competition simultaneously. The article demonstrates that arenas of competition function as interconnected structural nodes of the contemporary economy, while the AI foundation - combining semiconductors, cloud services, and AI software and services - serves as the core platform of current technological races. Omniscalers are conceptualized as actors that scale not a single product, but an infrastructural capability reusable across multiple technological and market environments, thereby generating cumulative self-reinforcing effects. The study proves that digital inequality increasingly concerns access to scaling infrastructures rather than only formal access to technologies, and that it manifests itself at the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels as asymmetry between firms, sectors, countries, and regions. The scientific novelty lies in interpreting omniscalers as structural actors of a new phase of technological races, refining the understanding of digital inequality as inequality of access, control, and scaling, and advancing the proposition that arenas of competition are key structural nodes of contemporary global transformations.