The great-power contest is not unfolding on battlefields or carrier decks, but inside data halls cooled by air conditioning, far from America’s shores. Rows of servers and racks of graphics processing units now carry as much strategic weight as military bases once did. Each deal for cloud access or advanced chips is a form of statecraft, binding partners into one camp’s technology ecosystem while locking out the other.
The United States is using AI infrastructure — data centers, cloud controls, and compute access — as a tool of power projection in the Arabian Gulf. By tying investment and capacity to governance safeguards, Washington can align regional partners with its security preferences, crowd out Chinese platforms, and set the rules for how AI is built and deployed. But the leverage is fragile.
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