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AI Infrastructure is the New Empire: Technofeudalism Goes Global at the Gulf

AI Infrastructure is the New Empire: Technofeudalism Goes Global at the Gulf
Image credit to Axios.

Over a decade ago, when I entered the tech and media industry, there was a prevailing belief that innovation would democratize access, empower individuals, and create a more open world. Tech was framed as a liberating force, driven by ideals of decentralization, open-source collaboration, and global connectivity.

But that vision has not materialized. Instead, we've witnessed the consolidation of digital infrastructure, platforms, and governance under the control of a small group, an analysis I break down further here. The modern digital economy has become increasingly centralized, what some have termed a new form of technofeudalism, one where power flows not through state institutions but through privately controlled networks and platforms.

The recent tech summit in the Middle East, spearheaded by President Donald Trump, represents a new phase in this transformation: the global expansion of a privatized digital empire.

A New Model of Power: Exported

On his May 2025 tour of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, Trump was accompanied by some of the most influential CEOs in tech: Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Andy Jassy (Amazon), Lisa Su (AMD), and Elon Musk (SpaceX/Starlink), among others. The summit resulted in a series of high-profile AI and infrastructure deals, collectively valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars (Axios, May 2025).

Among the most notable agreements:

  • Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund-backed startup Humain announced a deal with Nvidia to purchase 18,000 Blackwell chips for a new 500-megawatt data center.
  • The UAE agreed to import up to 500,000 Nvidia chips as part of a partnership to construct what will be the largest AI campus outside the United States, managed jointly by American and Emirati firms.
  • Amazon Web Services and Cisco signed agreements with Gulf-based AI firms to build out regional cloud and cybersecurity infrastructure.
  • Starlink signed new sovereign satellite connectivity deals in Saudi Arabia, further embedding Musk’s control over global internet access.

These deals signal a lot more than foreign investment, they also reflect a new mode of infrastructure diplomacy, where access to AI compute, cloud services, and chip manufacturing is being traded for political alignment and market dominance.

From Platform Capitalism to Technoglobalism

In my prior writing on the rise of technofeudalism, I argued that today's tech giants no longer simply compete for market share instead they increasingly function like sovereign actors, setting rules, allocating access, and intervening in geopolitical affairs. This summit exemplifies that shift:

  • CEOs brokered directly with monarchs and state leaders, often outside of formal diplomatic channels.
  • Agreements bypassed Biden-era export controls, which had previously limited chip sales to the Gulf due to concerns about Chinese access (NYT, May 2025).
  • Trump’s administration proposed replacing the Biden-era chip export rules with a negotiation-based framework, essentially turning U.S. tech dominance into a lever of soft power.
"Who controls A.I. is the geopolitical question of our time." — Jim Secreto, former U.S. Commerce Department official (NYT, 2025)

Technological Infrastructure as Strategic Terrain i.e. The New Silk Road

Historically, empires controlled ports, trade routes, and physical resources. Today, the new terrain of power includes:

  • Compute access (via Nvidia, AMD)
  • Satellite internet infrastructure (via Starlink)
  • AI model deployment and integration (via OpenAI, AWS, Google Cloud)
  • Data center geography (the physical hosting of intelligence infrastructure)

The significance of this shift is profound. For example, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are now expected to host some of the world’s largest AI training facilities, with direct input from U.S. firms. This not only centralizes infrastructure in the Gulf but also gives these states geopolitical bargaining chips.

Moreover, the deals may create unintended security consequences. Analysts and lawmakers have raised concerns that Gulf nations, with their longstanding ties to China and Russia, may become backdoor channels for adversaries to access restricted U.S. technologies (Axios, 2025).

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party responded by introducing legislation to limit the export of high-end AI chips to countries with ambiguous geopolitical alignments. Democratic lawmakers issued a joint statement calling the Trump-brokered deals "a significant threat to U.S. national security" and accused the administration of "putting the Gulf first" (Axios, 2025).

The Globalization of a Closed Model

What is especially noteworthy is that the American tech model being exported is not democratic, transparent, or decentralized. It is deeply hierarchical and corporate-led. In effect, the U.S. is offering something beyond just hardware and software. A governance model:

  • One in which a handful of private actors control the infrastructure of intelligence.
  • Where policy decisions are embedded in platform design, rather than debated in legislatures.
  • Where state sovereignty is partially outsourced to foreign-run cloud systems and compute grids.
"With the sale of the U.S.'s most advanced technology, [Trump] also sold the American model of the industry that made it: enormous amounts of power concentrated in the hands of a few men." — The Guardian, May 2025

This mirrors the logic of what Shoshana Zuboff called “surveillance capitalism”, but with an even more expansive remit: national infrastructure, public governance, and global diplomacy are all now shaped by platform economics.

Closing Thoughts: From Technofeudalism to Technoglobalism

If the past decade was about platform centralization, the next will be about its geopolitical export (and the ramifications of the above deals). What we witnessed in the Gulf was not just foreign investment, but also the extension of a new logic of empire, one that's armed not by soldiers or missiles, but by APIs, data centers, satellites, and chip stacks. AI is the new oil, the new empire.

And technofeudalism, once confined to app stores and algorithmic feeds, is now becoming technoglobalism: a cross-border, cross-sector, state-corporate hybrid empire. The architects of this new world are not the elected officials such as prime ministers or diplomats, they are engineers, VCs, and CEOs. And they are installing this empire, deal by deal, node by node, under the banner of innovation.

The real question now isn’t just whether AI will reshape geopolitics. It’s who will shape AI and in whose image the future will be built.

References:

Swanson, Anna, and Mickle, Tripp. “For Trump, It’s a New Era of Dealmaking with Tech’s Most Coveted Commodity.” The New York Times, 12 May 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/technology/trump-middle-east-ai-chips.html.

Snyder, Alison and Lawler, Dave. “Trump's Gulf gamble: Helping UAE and Saudi become AI powers.” Axios, 18 May 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/05/18/trump-gulf-ai-deals-saudi-uae-security-china-risk.

Montgomery, Blake. "How Donald Trump's 'Historic' Gulf State deals benefit a handful of powerful men." The Guardian, 17 May 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/17/donald-trump-gulf-states-ai.

Huda, Kashfin. "The Great Tech Disillusionment and The Race Toward Technofeudalism." LinkedIN Pulse and Ghost.io, April 2025. https://kashfinhuda.ghost.io/the-great-tech-disillusionment-and-the-race-toward-technofeudalism.