Something big happened in the Persian
Gulf in May 2025. Donald Trump, fresh off one of the most astonishing
comebacks in recent political history, hopped from one Arab capital to
the next. He was greeted not merely as a visiting head of state but as
something like a returning emperor. The images were surreal: camel
processions, sword dances, ululating crowds, gleaming skyscrapers, and
desert megaprojects rising from the sand like mirages. Even more
staggering were the numbers. By the end of his tour of Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, Trump announced that U.S. companies
had signed deals worth an eye-watering $2 trillion.1
This was, by any measure, the sale of the century, crafted by a man who
styles himself as the ultimate dealmaker. But what kind of world order
was being built in the Gulf, and how did we get here?
To understand what was unfolding in the Gulf, we need to rewind. The
deeper logic of this new order wasn’t born in a single summit; it
emerged, barely noticed, through a series of seemingly disconnected
events over the last two years. The subsequent outbreak of a brief but
dramatic shooting war between Israel and Iran—and the U.S. intervention it induced—are not likely to change its overall trajectory and may ultimately function to solidify it.
A Tale of Ambition and High Stakes
Throughout President Biden’s four years in office, his administration
found itself increasingly entangled in the world’s oldest geopolitical
trip wires. Against the backdrop of a high-stakes confrontation with
Russia over Ukraine, and a simmering confrontation with China over trade
and technology, the press talked about a “New Cold War.” In a bold
gambit to regain the strategic advantage, President Joe Biden unveiled a
flagship project at the September 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi: a new
trade corridor linking India to Europe via the Arabian Peninsula, dubbed
the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor, or IMEC.2
It was touted as the West’s response to the Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI), Beijing’s global enterprise linking roads, ports, and railways
with the goal of making China the center of a vast Eurasian trade
network.
But just one month after Biden’s news conference, Hamas launched its
devastating October 7 attack on Israel, plunging the region into chaos
and disrupting the fragile normalization talks between Israel and Saudi
Arabia. The fallout sent shockwaves through the very region IMEC was
meant to stabilize, casting doubt on the project’s future.
At the same time, as if in a parallel universe, another portentous
development was unfolding. This one less bloody but no less
destabilizing: artificial intelligence (AI) had moved from speculative
hype to a widely accessible everyday technology, with potentially
world-transforming impact. OpenAI, the company at the forefront of this
revolution, began with no clear business model. Its founders half-joked
that once they built an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), they’d
simply ask it how to generate returns. But with the release of ChatGPT
in 2022 and the broader generative AI boom that followed, the company
stumbled into a business model: automation at scale.
By late 2024, however, OpenAI was no longer a scrappy research
outfit. Rather, it was a financial blackhole with geopolitical
consequences. The financial demands of developing cutting-edge AI had
become staggering. In that year alone, the company lost $5 billion.3
Its CEO, Sam Altman, a lean figure with steel-blue eyes and an uncanny
ability to command attention without theatrics, understood what few
others did: there was no turning back. The only way out of the debt trap
was through.
So Altman doubled down. He envisioned a global infrastructure network
to match the scale of his ambition: a $7 trillion blueprint to build
the physical and digital scaffolding for the AI age.4
That sum exceeded Japan’s GDP and the combined market capitalization of
Apple and Microsoft. But to Altman, it wasn’t optional; it was urgent.
In a widely circulated blog post, he warned that without massive new
compute supply, AI could become “a very limited resource that wars get
fought over.”5
There was also a more calculated logic at play. By building and
controlling the infrastructure of compute, OpenAI could secure a
dominant position in the AI economy, just as Amazon had done by
monopolizing the infrastructure of online commerce. Altman’s blueprint
called for a massive buildout: data centers, semiconductor fabs, power
plants, high-capacity fiber networks, and new trade corridors. He
pitched the plan not only to Microsoft and Nvidia but also to Persian
Gulf governments.
By then, Gulf sovereign wealth funds had already pivoted toward AI at scale. In 2024, Gulf states—the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait—dramatically
ramped up AI investments, collectively committing tens of billions in
funds, data centers, and strategic infrastructure. Altman, alongside
other U.S. AI executives, began quietly deepening ties with these
regimes.
At the center of Altman’s courtship stood a shadowy figure who
represented his country’s towering ambition to become an AI superpower.
His name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed. He is brother to the ruler of the
United Arab Emirates, Mohamed Bin Zayed, and his national security
advisor. Tahnoun also serves as his country’s AI czar. Tahnoun heads
both the MGX fund, an Emirati investment firm in AI with $100 billion in
capital, and G42, a vast technology conglomerate involved in fields
ranging from AI to biotechnology, with particular expertise in
government-backed cyber operations and surveillance systems.6
These roles give Tahnoun unmatched leverage across the region’s AI,
finance, and compute sectors. Tahnoun’s master plan and Altman’s grand
strategy overlapped, and they began working hand in hand. Thus, Altman’s
vision for planetary AI infrastructure had found its anchor in the
fossil-fuel-rich, regulation-light economies of the Persian Gulf.
While the Biden administration signaled its commitment to
constraining the global diffusion of American AI technology by imposing
more and more export controls, Altman was already forging the deals that
would make such constraints obsolete. His revolution needed capital,
land, and dispatchable power, and the Gulf was the only place offering
all three.
Altman was not alone. His turn to the Gulf reflected a broader
convergence, one that would come to define the coalition behind Trump’s
return to power. It was an amalgam of AI moguls, cryptofinanciers,
fossil fuel interests, and real estate developers. What binds Trump’s
business coalition is the structural interdependence of its core sectors—AI, crypto, energy, and real estate—each
feeding the infrastructural needs of the others. AI is the engine: it
demands colossal compute resources, generates vast data flows, and
drives the automation of decision-making across sectors. Crypto is the
payment system: it monetizes usage, distributes rewards, and enables
capital to flow across borders without much regulatory friction. But
these technologies are intensely resource-hungry. They require a
constant, high-volume energy supply, something intermittent renewables
can’t provide. This is also why the coalition favors fossil fuels and
nuclear, since only they offer the stability and scale needed.
All of this—compute, power, fiber, liquidity—ultimately
rests on real estate. Land, buildings, and zoning regimes form the
chassis of the entire system. Data centers, energy hubs, and submarine
cable landing stations must be physically sited, cooled, secured, and
connected.
The Middle East, particularly the Persian Gulf, has reemerged as a
strategic hub for Trump’s business coalition. With its abundant
dispatchable energy, permissive regulatory regimes, and position at the
intersection of global trade routes, the Gulf is uniquely positioned to
anchor the infrastructure of the AI age. The coalition’s ascent, enabled
by the election of the AI-industry-aligned Trump, meant that Biden’s
IMEC project, long stalled by regional conflict, would now be retooled
and repurposed.
IMEC retained its original ambition: to link Europe and Asia through a
secure, high-capacity trade corridor. But under Trump, it acquired an
additional layer, a digital one. The emphasis shifted to the corridor’s
southern leg, the route connecting Gulf-based data centers with India’s
vast pool of educated, low-cost office labor. How these Gulf data
campuses will link to European markets remains unclear, but Trump’s
visit offered some hints that will be explored below. As under Biden,
the project still aligns with the Gulf monarchies’ goals of diversifying
income, gaining access to advanced technologies, and elevating their
global relevance.
Yet under Trump, the political logic of IMEC has shifted
dramatically. No longer a multilateral initiative shepherded by
technocrats and international institutions, the corridor is now turning
into a privatized artery of power governed not by memoranda of
understanding or diplomatic summits, but by sovereign wealth funds,
ambitious tech firms, and transactional deal-making.
To be sure, the Trump administration has floated other
infrastructural ambitions: a land bridge through Canada and Greenland to
the emerging Transpolar Sea Route and a renewed push to control
chokepoints like the Panama Canal.7
But these remain geopolitical mirages: underdeveloped, logistically
uncertain, and disconnected from any coherent implementation strategy.
IMEC, by contrast, is real, resilient, and already underway. After a
year of regional upheaval, it is paradoxically more secure than ever,
bolstered by a convergence of interests among Gulf states and countries
like Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, all of which see in the corridor a path to
integration, logistical leverage, and infrastructure rents. It is
moving rapidly from planning to execution and, unlike most of Trump’s
ventures, reflects a rare alignment of capital, geography, and strategic
intent.
To understand how the road to Riyadh became the epicenter of Trump’s
Eurasian strategy, we must return to New Delhi, where Biden first
launched the corridor.
From Biden to Trump: IMEC under New Management
The announcement of IMEC at the September 2023 G20 Summit in the
Indian capital marked a rare moment of transcontinental alignment, with
India, the United States, the European Union, and key Gulf states as
signatories. But the corridor wasn’t just a symbolic rebuke to Beijing.
It was a strategic effort to anchor India more firmly in the Western
orbit without demanding formal alignment. By improving India’s access to
European markets and channeling Gulf capital into regional logistics
infrastructure, the United States hoped to offer Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi a viable alternative to deepening ties with China or
Russia. The goal was not to absorb India into an alliance but to prevent
its gravitational drift toward a rival Eurasian bloc.
At stake was not just competition with China’s BRI, with its Northern
and Middle Corridors linking China to Europe through Russia and Central
Asia, but also competition with yet another rival trade route, the
Russian- and Iranian-backed International North–South Transport Corridor
(INSTC).8
That project, nearly complete, connects Russia, Iran, and India through
a web of ports, rails, and Caspian crossings. IMEC was a bet that
India’s ambitions could be turned westward not by ideology but by
infrastructure.
IMEC was Biden’s attempt to carve a U.S.-aligned corridor through the
heart of Eurasia’s infrastructure contest, which would mean a resilient
supply chain outside of China’s reach. Accordingly, IMEC was framed as a
state project: rooted in formal diplomacy, coordinated with the
European Union, aligned with Israel, and backed by a growing U.S.
military footprint in the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea. And in many
ways, it was the last major push of a technocratic, multilateral
hegemony: coordinated through formal diplomacy, reliant on NATO and EU
frameworks, and governed by elite consensus rather than charismatic
politics or brute coercion.
That vision unraveled on October 7, 2023. As later revealed by
internal Hamas records, the attack was not merely about Gaza. It aimed
to disrupt the regional realignment that IMEC depended on, particularly
the pending normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which
threatened to marginalize Hamas diplomatically. Iran responded by
activating its regional network: Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq
and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. Tehran saw IMEC not just as a
Western power play but as a direct competitor to its own strategic
corridor, the INSTC, a project it views as a tool to overcome the
stringent sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union. The
resulting conflict spiraled into a full-blown regional war. What had
begun as a diplomatic corridor became a battlefield.
In 2024, the Biden administration mounted one of the largest U.S.
military deployments to the region since the Iraq War, positioning
carrier strike groups, air defenses, and strategic bombers to deter
direct Iranian escalation. American protection shielded Israel from
large-scale missile attacks and enabled the IDF to inflict serious
damage on Hezbollah and Hamas. The collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria,
following Hezbollah’s defeat, delivered a major blow to Iranian
influence. The Biden administration hoped that these battlefield gains
would revive the push toward Israeli-Saudi normalization and breathe
life back into IMEC.
Under Biden, artificial intelligence had been deliberately fenced off
from corridor diplomacy. The administration viewed AI through the lens
of national security, not market expansion. Beginning in 2023 and
continuing into 2024, Washington imposed strict export controls on
AI-enabling chips, citing risks of diversion to China. These controls
affected Gulf states like the UAE, requiring a U.S. license to obtain
advanced semiconductors such as Nvidia’s H100.9
Nevertheless, the UAE pushed back hard. In 2024, Tahnoun bin Zayed, the
UAE’s national security advisor, led an intensive campaign to gain
exemptions from these controls. The Emirati conglomerate G42 was at the
center of this push. It had already severed ties with China’s Huawei and
rebranded as a trusted U.S. partner. But American intelligence agencies
weren’t convinced. G42’s historic entanglements with Beijing, its use
of Chinese‑built infrastructure, and its role in spyware operations all
raised red flags. CIA briefings warned of backdoor leakage of U.S. tech
to Chinese actors via G42, while then Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo
and CIA Director William Burns personally traveled to Abu Dhabi to press
for tighter controls.10....
First up, some of the deals that were announced today. From Bloomberg, May 15:
