No to Pax Silica!

The initiative was joined by a host of countries such as Japan, Israel, Australia, the European Union, Germany, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates. The Philippines joined in April 2026.

The United States and the Marcos regime announced that Pax Silica will manifest itself in the Philippines through a 4,000 acre (about 1,620 hectare) AI-native industrial hub in New Clark City, Tarlac, within the Luzon Economic Corridor, designating it as the first Pax Silica “Economic Security Zone.” For industrialized countries like Japan and South Korea, they get to handle high-value industries such as memory chip production, semiconductor design and AI development. For backwards countries including the Philippines, our primary role is supplying and processing critical minerals.

The final Pax Silica master agreement is expected to be signed on November 16, 2026 — the day Donald Trump visits the Philippines for the ASEAN Summit in Metro Manila. This is being rushed despite the many different concerns being raised by multiple sectors in the Philippines.

The United States sees China as its primary competitor in the economic, technological, and military dimensions of artificial intelligence. China is the world’s second-largest research and design spender, occupies around 60% global rare-earth mining and 90% global rare-earth processing. As it stands today, the US has to import much of its rare-earth minerals from China.

With China’s growing geopolitical power and the United States itself forced to be dependent on their competitor’s imports, this dependence creates a strategic vulnerability for the US and its allies because the AI industry relies on many of the same supply nodes that China has come to dominate.

Marcos Jr. presses for the need for the Philippines to move upward the supply chain from just being a resource extraction node — he says that Pax Silica aims to industrialize the Philippines. Seeking to please capitalist investors and the US, Marcos Jr. also seeks to reinforce the Philippines-US strategic relationship by allowing the US to use Filipino land to outpace China in the AI race.

However, selling our critical minerals to the United States instead of selling it to China won’t automatically leave us better off and produce any real industrialization. Behind the veil of “development,” Pax Silica represents the further integration of the Philippines into the US-led economic and geopolitical bloc. Rather than breaking away and forging our own path to development, the Philippines simply becomes more dependent on the whims of the global market and subject to the wholesale extraction of our people’s land, labor, and environment.

If we are to take Marcos Jr.’s word on Pax Silica being our means to develop — we ask: development for whom?

On BCDA’s claims of “thousands of jobs”

The headline numbers on how many jobs Pax Silica will bring to the Philippines is just a projection, not a promise — meaning that this is not a guaranteed outcome. Besides having no publicly released study on how these projections were justified, there is also no public document that contractually requires the foreign companies going here to provide the hundreds of thousands of jobs for Filipinos. They face no consequences if they fail to meet this target.

We should also question Pax Silica’s “AI-native” as the United States’ own direction in AI investments is notorious for causing laying worker layoffs, not producing more jobs as we can see in massive layoffs even in more developed countries.

On Labor Rights and Job Quality

Equally important to how many jobs is the workers’ rights and job quality that comes with the work that Pax Silica brings. Contractualization and chronically low wages remain the biggest issues Filipino workers face. If Pax Silica brings jobs into the country under the same broken Philippine labor system, we risk letting these foreign corporations take advantage of our systems to hire workers into temporary, contractual and inadequately paid labor. Without any publicly released document that explicitly protects workers’ right to unionization, collective bargaining, decent wages, regularization, and workplace safety — Pax Silica is bound to be just another phase of the long history of labor rights violations in the country brought by the export-oriented labor model.

On levelling up the Supply Chain and Technology Transfer

Moving up the global technology supply chains means we need to be able to secure technology that will be deployed in the Philippines to start producing on our own, instead of repeatedly importing from other countries. This requires a contract on technology transfer — passing on industry practices, tools and techniques to Filipino firms so that they can learn, adapt and own new kinds of technology.

Pax Silica fails to guarantee any form of technology transfer — foreign investment alone just means that foreign corporations can set up their factories in the Philippines, but Filipinos will own none of the technology. Ownership and control of the technology, intellectual property, and high-value segments of the supply chain can remain with foreign corporations, while the Philippines is left with lower-value industries. Historically, foreign investment has not automatically resulted in meaningful technology transfer or the development of domestic technological capacity. Thus, even with nearly a hundred billion dollars in foreign investment, we will remain underdeveloped and worse, we’ll depend much more on foreign capital and technology.

Large-scale theft of the land of farmers and IP communities

Despite the repeated lies that there will be no affected communities echoed by the BCDA, in reality there are thousands of indigenous Aetas and farmers that Pax Silica plans to displace in Capas, Tarlac. The BCDA claims to have given out up to 15,000 hectares of land for Aetas and 10,000 hectares of land for farmers, but even the BCDA admits that a large part of this land they promised have already been given out to private developers as part of New Clark City.

There is also a pending application for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain to the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples filed by the indigenous Aetas fighting for their right to their own ancestral lands. Based on the most recent data, there are an estimated 20,000 indigenous Aetas and 15,000 farmers that rely on and work on the land seized by New Clark City. For the BCDA, there are no communities and farmers affected by Pax Silica because they don’t want to recognize their right to their own land in the New Clark City area.

Damage to our environment

Pax Silica is also expected to expand and grow the number of huge and destructive mines in the Philippines. The BCDA likes to say that their industrial zone will have zero mining operations, but the Philippines’ explicit primary role in Pax Silica is to provide the raw materials for processing. The US is already funding the expansion of new mining areas outside of Capas, Tarlac for Pax Silica.

Massive extraction of water and electricity

In the face of water inaccessibility and the impending drought brought on by El Nino, the Pax Silica project is being pushed despite risking Filipinos’ water supplies. Even if the BCDA has stated that there will be no more data centers being built in Capas, Tarlac, it states that it still needs up to 90 million liters of water daily to sustain its operations. This is equivalent to the water consumption rate of 600,000 to 900,000 Filipinos. Until now, there are still about 40 million Filipinos without access to clean and potable water. Why prioritize Pax Silica over them?

The BCDA also states that when their industrial zone is fully operational, they’ll need 3 gigawatts of energy to power everything. This is more than double the capacity of the largest conventional operating plant in the country today. An industrial zone that needs this much energy will definitely strain the Philippine electrical grid, which has already been plagued with chronic electricity blackouts and one of the highest prices in Southeast Asia. The government is ready to set up power plants just for Pax Silica, but is ignoring the energy crisis that ordinary Filipino citizens are facing.

Surveillance technology

Surveillance technology funded by US state departments is building an unregulated corporate police state because of dangerous mass surveillance tools being used against everyday citizens. Flock cameras are costing local governments and police departments in the US hundreds of thousands of dollars from the government to track and surveil every civilian even without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. US domestic law enforcement and national security agencies like ICE use Palantir’s Clearview AI, which scraped tens of billions of images from social media without consent to make a facial recognition database to identify anyone based on anyone’s photo — a dangerous tool to track down and identify anyone they want to.

Autonomous weapons for war

The US Department of War has itself directed tens of billions of dollars into developing their own forms of artificial intelligence: specifically autonomous weapons of war. They are actively pursuing R&D development on autonomous combat and surveillance systems, advanced big data technology for command and control, and other optimization tech specifically for improving how they wage their military campaigns around the world.

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Trump is actively pushing for the unhindered development and growth of artificial intelligence despite all the concerns: no clear use case that benefits ordinary citizens, resource scarcity that drives up the prices of not only technology, but all commodities. It is clear to see that any form of artificial intelligence that the United States funds and produces is technology that only serves to assert and maintain US imperialist dominance — not only against their own citizens, but also against many different countries around the world.

National Industrialization

National Industrialization means building Philippine-owned productive capacity, from basic industries, manufacturing, and rural industries, so the country produces more of what it consumes rather than relying mainly on raw-material exports and imported finished goods. National industrialization means using the country’s natural resources and labor for the construction of a domestic industry with strategic sectors such as agriculture, oil, mining, heavy metal, technology, and others under public or national control in the interest of the people.

Genuine Agrarian Reform

Genuine Agrarian Reform calls for free distribution of agricultural land to landless tillers, the abolition of landlord control, and support for farmers to become productive producers. It can range from a minimum program of lowering land rent and interest rates, reduced farm-input prices, higher farm wages, and cooperative farming; its maximum program can be up to free land distribution to landless peasants.

Put together, National Industrialization and Genuine Agrarian Reform is an alternative to Pax Silica because it offers a domestically rooted, land-and-labor centered development strategy rather than integration into a US-led, AI-and-semiconductor supply-chain bloc. Pax Silica seeks to secure allied supply chains for chips, minerals, energy, AI infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing while National Industrialization and Genuine Agrarian Reform focuses on the basic and immediate needs of the Filipino people such as food sovereignty, land redistribution, economic self-sufficiency, domestic industry, and the economic backbone to assert our sovereignty against superpowers such as the US and China.

Technology for the People!

The Filipino people do not have to settle for advanced technology that steals huge amounts of land, water and electricity. We do not have to use the same artificial intelligence models that routinely take jobs away from workers around the world. The largest tech corporations in the world take advantage of technology in order to manipulate and profit off of users around the world, while hoarding the advancements that they make and making sure the people cannot own it, learn from it and create their own technology fit for our needs.

The enemy is not the technology, but who controls and gets to dictate the technology and what it’s used for. It is clear that the United States wants to continue developing artificial intelligence and other forms of advanced technology for the sole purpose of establishing its dominance on other countries. We demand for technology that is owned by and controlled by the people, where we can focus our time and resources on developing the kinds of technology that people urgently and genuinely need.