How U.S.-Gulf AI Deals Project Power– warontherocks.com
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Excerpt:
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. Without resilience and enforceable compliance, these arrangements risk becoming single points of failure or, worse, conduits for adversaries.
To make this new form of statecraft durable, U.S. policymakers should establish standard deal architectures with Gulf partners that combine hard technical safeguards, strict governance requirements, and built-in contingency plans. That means binding model weights to secure enclaves, tracking accelerators and workloads, embedding snapback clauses for violations, and pairing technical assurances with human rights standards. Done right, this approach can turn American-backed AI infrastructure into a lasting source of influence — quiet, scalable, and harder to dislodge than a forward operating base.
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