The New Geopolitics of AI: From Commercial Software to Strategic Infrastructure
By Rajarshi Mani Imagine two distinct battlefronts unfolding at the exact same moment. On the physical front, a state military releases a video threatening the total destruction of a $30 billion AI data campus in Abu Dhabi, flashing photos of Silicon Valley CEOs alongside high-value military targets. 🚀 On the invisible front, no missiles fly and no firewalls break. Instead, automated systems quietly route millions of standard API requests across cloud platforms to siphon off billions of tokens of model reasoning—legally, seamlessly, and invisibly. 🔑 These two events might look completely unrelated, but they point to the exact same reality: AI has crossed a historic threshold. It is no longer just commercial software that companies build to win market share—it is strategic infrastructure that nation-states fight over. The Physical Front: When Compute Becomes a Military Target 🎯 When Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released a video targeting OpenAI’s $30 billion...
