Trump’s Road to Riyadh: The Geopolitics of AI and Energy Infrastructure - American Affairs Journal

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

Despite pressure from the White House and threats of sanctions, the Emiratis held firm. Sheikh Tahnoun intensified his outreach efforts in Washington, securing meetings with top U.S. tech CEOs and lobbying the National Security Council directly. But the Biden administration held its line: without firewalls against Chinese influence, there would be no access to America’s AI stack. In January 2025, Biden formalized a sweeping AI Diffusion Framework aimed at preventing the export of advanced U.S.-origin models, chips, and compute infrastructure to countries deemed geopolitical risks, including the UAE. The goal was strategic: to maintain U.S. supremacy in foundational compute layers and block any diffusion of dual-use technology to potential adversaries.¹¹

Trump’s arrival changed the equation. As he returned to office, Trump confronted the question of what to do with the whole IMEC project. The new administration has evidently decided to retain it but with a twist: privatizing the initiative and dramatically reorienting its direction and purpose. Under Biden, AI wasn’t on the menu because Biden had treated it as a national security concern; under Trump, AI became the main course as he turned the technology into a tradable asset, one to be monetized through private channels.

If the alliance between the AI industry and the Gulf states began as a quiet courtship initiated by Sam Altman’s trillion-dollar vision for global compute infrastructure, its public consummation came, appropriately enough, on Valentine’s Day of this year. On February 14, 2025, Prime Minister Modi visited Washington for a high-profile summit with President Trump. The event culminated in a joint press conference where Trump announced that the United States and India would work together to build what he called “one of the greatest trade routes in all of history.”¹²

The statement marked the Trump administration’s dramatic recom­mitment to IMEC, but Trump gave it new flair. Trump and Modi explicitly linked IMEC to the future of AI, emphasizing the need for digital connectivity to support the coming wave of compute-intensive technologies. The revised vision would stretch, in Trump’s words, “from India to Israel to Italy and onward to the United States,” and it would include not just railways and ports but “many, many undersea cables.”¹³ These cables were not a rhetorical flourish.

IMEC, once imagined as a clean counterweight to China’s Belt and Road, has now been repurposed into a privatized artery connecting Gulf compute to Indian talent. This made perfect sense. India has long been seen as the world’s back office: a land of coders, clerks, and call centers. But today it plays a far more strategic role in the AI supply chain. Its 1,600 Global Capability Centers (GCCs), which employ 1.66 million professionals, have moved well beyond basic IT and customer service.¹⁴ These fully owned subsidiaries of multinational corporations now handle advanced functions: software engineering, data analytics, AI research, cybersecurity, and even core product development. In effect, they are how the corporate West operationalizes its digital ambitions at scale and at lower cost. The GCC sector already accounts for over a third of India’s services exports and is growing rapidly.¹⁵

As these centers begin working with more sophisticated AI models, India and its vast digital labor force will become increasingly dependent on the Gulf’s infrastructure to train and deploy that AI at scale. This gives India a dual role within Trump’s AI corridor: a global labor hub and a regional client of Gulf-based compute power.

A New Gulf Vision Comes into View

Just one month later, the Trump administration’s vision was articulated with a new layer of public clarity. In a wide-ranging interview with Tucker Carlson on March 22, 2025, Steve Witkoff, longtime Trump associate, real estate developer, and current United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, laid out the stakes of the emerging Gulf-centered techno-economy.¹⁶ His remarks picked up where the Modi-Trump summit had left off, not just reaffirming IMEC’s role but embedding it in a broader architecture of AI, cryptocurrencies, and geopolitical reordering.

Witkoff specifically identified the Persian Gulf as a new frontier for AI investment. But building infrastructure in the Middle East, as he noted, requires financial underwriting, especially to cover “war risk.” What the region needs, in his view, is a U.S.-backed “security wrapper” that would make Gulf investments bankable. If such guarantees could be provided, Witkoff argued, the emerging regional ecosystem—from Israel to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar—could evolve into a market “much bigger than Europe.” He emphasized the role of young Gulf leaders eager to diversify their economies and integrate into global tech networks as the engine of this transformation. In his framing, peace and profit were intertwined; economic normalization and tech collaboration were not outcomes of diplomacy, they were its incentives.

The convergence with Trump’s broader goals was unmistakable. Just as Modi and Trump linked AI to fiber cables and trade routes, Witkoff mapped AI to capital flows, geopolitical stability, and even postwar reconstruction. He floated the idea of hyperscale data centers in Gaza as part of a “Better Living” initiative, an ambitious, if speculative, vision of how compute infrastructure could underpin regional peacebuilding.

Crypto also featured prominently in Witkoff’s remarks. He listed blockchain, alongside AI and robotics, as a key sector in which Israel and the Gulf states were already active, describing it as part of the technological foundation for a future Gulf-Israel-U.S. alliance. Separately, Witkoff praised President Trump’s commitment to cryptocurrency more broadly, noting that the former president had established a “Crypto Advisory Council”¹⁷ and signed an executive order to create a “Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.” These moves, he claimed, positioned Trump as a champion of decentralized finance, offering Americans “an alternative to the government’s failing system and frankly to the U.S. dollar.” Taken together, the message was clear: the Persian Gulf was not just a strategic node in global logistics, it was also fast becoming the capital base for a new AI- and crypto-powered economic order.

This moment revealed Witkoff’s role as a bridge figure between Trump’s real estate past and his crypto future. It so happens that Steve Witkoff’s son, Zach Witkoff, is a cofounder of World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture closely aligned with the Trump family¹⁸ (60 percent of it is owned by a Trump-affiliated entity and the firm raised over $550 million through its $WLFI governance token).¹⁹

As a matter of fact, Trump changed his position on this financial technology quite a bit. In 2019, Trump posted on social media that cryptocurrencies were “not money” and had value that was “highly volatile and based on thin air.”²⁰ In 2021, Trump had dismissed Bitcoin as “a scam against the dollar” and warned against the dangers of unregulated crypto assets.²¹ But in February 2024, something happened that may have pushed Trump to change his perspective.²²

Following the New York civil fraud ruling that month, Trump and key business associates were barred from leading New York–registered companies, and the Trump Organization was subjected to external financial monitoring. The company’s access to U.S.-based credit markets likely tightened.²³ While the ruling did not prohibit borrowing outright, it signaled elevated risk to commercial lenders. The verdict, which imposed a $454 million judgment against Trump and his codefendants, put the Trump Organization in a tight spot. When Trump sought to appeal the decision, he was unable to secure a bond for the full amount despite approaching more than thirty surety companies. None were willing to back the appeal without proof of liquid reserves approaching $1 billion, far beyond what Trump could demonstrate.²⁴ Although the appeals court later lowered the bond to $175 million, the episode exposed the extent of Trump’s financial vulnerability and his diminished access to traditional U.S. credit markets.

Within four months of that ruling, Trump began to sing a markedly different tune on cryptocurrencies. By July 2024, Trump was giving the keynote address at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and promising to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”²⁵ The Trump Organization also expanded its ties with Gulf investors. These relationships, long cultivated during and after Trump’s first term, increasingly functioned around this time as alternative chan­nels of liquidity and deal-making outside the reach of New York–based financial institutions. The enchanting city of Dubai emerged as a key node in this financial workaround.

Crypto Convergence in Dubai

Token2049, held in late April 2025 at the Madinat Jumeirah resort in Dubai, wasn’t just a regular crypto conference: rather, its organizers planned it to be the coronation of a new ruling class. The scenes verged on the absurd: memecoin bills rained from the ceiling, whale mascots in astronaut suits mingled with investors, and convicted crypto felons now rebranded as visionaries made choreographed returns to the spotlight.²⁶ But beneath the rave aesthetics and redemption arcs, a new system of power was being unveiled: the fusion of Gulf sovereign wealth, American political dynasties, and blockchain finance into a post-sovereign monetary regime.

The choice of Dubai was no accident. The emirate has positioned itself as crypto’s new capital: ultra-low tax, regulator-free, and awash in sovereign capital. Indeed, the stage for this new status had been set just weeks earlier, when Sheikh Tahnoun paid a quiet but momentous visit to Trump’s Washington.

Tahnoun’s multiday tour in late March included a banquet at the White House, as well as meetings with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, and top U.S. officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The public spin emphasized “long-standing ties” and “economic and technological futures,” but the subtext was clear: the UAE was embedding itself at the core of Trump’s AI strategy and preparing for a deeper, more transactional alliance.

Tahnoun came bearing deals. His $100 billion AI fund, MGX, had already poured money into OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic. Now it was offering up billions more to help finance the $500 billion Stargate initiative, Trump’s flagship infrastructure plan to dominate global compute.²⁷ In return, the UAE wanted access to AI chips, cloud contracts, and to the U.S. tech stack more broadly. It seems that for Tahnoun, AI was the new oil, and he intended to control the pipelines.

Strategically, the visit helped rebrand the UAE from a hydrocarbon power to a digital one. During Tahnoun’s sojourn in Washington, ADQ, another Abu Dhabi-based sovereign fund chaired by Tahnoun, announced a $25 billion partnership with U.S. firms to power next-generation AI data centers across the United States, especially in the Sun Belt and Midwest.²⁸ The deal includes the construction of liquefied natural gas facilities for dispatchable energy, specialty chemical plants for cooling AI data centers, and major grid upgrades to integrate renewables and meet the soaring electricity demands of advanced compute infrastructure. His visit had laid the bureaucratic and ideological groundwork. Token2049 would deliver the spectacle.

There was another delicate matter. The highlight of the Token 2049 conference came when Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff took the main stage. The two were there representing World Liberty Financial. They announced a $2 billion deal with MGX.²⁹ It centered on a new Trump-branded stablecoin called USD1, which MGX secured rights to use for multibillion-dollar transactions via Binance, the world’s largest and most scandal-plagued crypto exchange. As New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton has noted, the Trump family is “rushing into crypto because they see it as a potential profit center,” with digital assets “quickly emerging as one of the single biggest, if not the single biggest, sources of revenues and profits for the Trump family.”³⁰

The Trump-MGX stablecoin deal wasn’t a side hustle; it was a business model. On the surface, USD1 was a digital token designed to maintain a 1:1 peg to the U.S. dollar—and “backed” by short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents.³¹ But there was no federal oversight, no public mandate, and no guarantee that each token actually corresponded to a redeemable dollar. It was legal only because no one had yet made it illegal. Moreover, Trump has become both the chief crypto policymaker and the single largest political beneficiary of crypto’s rise. His executive orders, such as the January 23 directive establishing a pro-stablecoin regulatory framework, have directly benefited World Liberty’s valuation and business model. Trump’s Securities and Exchange Com­mission (SEC) has rolled back enforcement, while the Department of Justice (DOJ) has quietly abandoned investigations into Trump allies like Binance.³²

This legal twilight zone enabled USD1 to function as a privatized monetary instrument: issued offshore, collateralized with U.S. public debt, and controlled not by a central bank—but by a Trump family firm, a Gulf monarchy, and a cartel of crypto-based oligarchs. Like Tether and Circle before them, the Trump Organization had cracked the ultimate arbitrage: mint private dollars, collect real ones from investors, park the proceeds in Treasuries, and pocket the yield. The public backed the debt; the oligarchs harvested the returns. This wasn’t just deregulation; it was financial sovereignty, sold off and tokenized.

Privatized Diplomacy

The Middle East has become the beating heart of the Trump Organization’s global real estate empire. At the center of this relationship is Dar Global, a company closely aligned with the government of Saudi Arabia. It is a luxury real estate developer with six active projects bearing the Trump name in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE. These are branding ventures in which the Trump Organization receives millions in fees simply for licensing its name, along with additional income from management services. These deals represent “the biggest growth chunk of the Trump real estate operations.”³³

Jared Kushner, who is, of course, married to Ivanka Trump, is at the center of it all. Since founding his private equity firm Affinity Partners in 2021, Kushner has parlayed his role in brokering the Abraham Accords into a sprawling business empire stitched across the region. Backed by $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, $1.5 billion from the Qatar Investment Authority, and additional capital from Abu Dhabi’s Lunate, Affinity now manages over $4.6 billion. Real estate is Kushner’s métier and medium. In Israel, his fund has taken strategic stakes in companies tied to cross-border commerce. In Gaza, Kushner famously floated the idea of evacuating the population to make way for luxury beachfront developments, a statement more telling than flippant. And in the Gulf, his close ties to Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia have yielded access to capital. As Kushner himself put it in March 2025, his goal is to build “one economic bloc linking the port of Haifa in Israel to Muscat in Oman.”³⁴

Eric Trump and Donald Jr. are building that bloc’s skyline and cashing in along the way. The Trump Organization, now largely managed by the president’s sons, has quietly inked a wave of real estate deals across the Gulf since their father’s return to office. In Dubai, an eighty-story Trump Tower is set to rise, part of a multi-hundred-million‑dollar partnership with Dar Global.³⁵ In Oman, the Trumps are developing a luxury golf resort projected to generate millions in licensing and management fees.³⁶ In Saudi Arabia, projects in Jeddah and Riyadh are backed by Dar Global, a company that has already paid the Trump Organization nearly $8 million in licensing fees from a single development in Oman between 2021 and early 2024; the firm stands to pay much more as construction progresses.³⁷

The pattern is unmistakable: Trump-branded towers and cryptocurrencies are proliferating in the same Gulf states whose sovereign wealth funds are bankrolling the construction of massive AI infrastructure. While American tech firms like Altman’s OpenAI may welcome Gulf partnerships, these deals hinge on export licenses, regulatory exemptions, and political goodwill that only the White House can unlock. In this context, the Trump family’s real estate and crypto ventures function as transactional currency—that is, as tools the Gulf monarchies can use to secure privileged access to U.S. technology. Crypto becomes a channel for influence and a vehicle for privatized diplomacy. This strategic investment in Trump family assets yielded substantial returns during the president’s recent visit to the region.

The Gulf Tour: Trump as Matchmaker-in-Chief

Trump’s May 2025 Gulf tour was the spectacular expression of a new AI‑powered world order that fuses American AI ambition with Gulf energy, land, and cash. Flanked by a phalanx of tech billionaires and corporate titans, including Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX), Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia), Andy Jassy (CEO of Amazon), and Alex Karp (CEO of Palantir), Trump unveiled a new model of globalization: high compute, low regulation, and sovereign-backed.

In the days leading up to Trump’s tour, the administration quietly dismantled one of the most significant restraints on U.S.-Gulf tech relations: the Biden-era AI Diffusion Rule, which had restricted exports of advanced semiconductors even to U.S.-aligned nations like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The rule, which was set to take effect on May 15, placed Gulf states in a lower-tier category, capping their access to high-performance technology. But just before Air Force One touched down in Riyadh, the Department of Commerce announced it would rescind the rule, calling it “overly complex” and “counterproductive.”³⁸ This decision, driven in part by intense Gulf lobbying with the Trump family and interventions by Trump advisers like David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, cleared the path for the unprecedented chip deals that followed.³⁹

Amid this buildup, Elon Musk made a last-ditch effort to derail one of the tour’s flagship announcements: the Stargate UAE data center partnership, which included OpenAI, Nvidia, and G42. According to press reports, Musk phoned G42 executives ahead of the visit and warned that the deal would not win Trump’s blessing unless his own company, xAI, was included. This intervention appears to explain Musk’s abrupt appearance at a Trump meeting with Saudi officials during the visit. Though the episode reportedly triggered a scramble among Trump’s team to placate him, no public statement has included xAI in the final arrangement. At stake was more than a personal rivalry. Musk’s feud with Altman has come to represent competing models of AI power: one rooted in sovereign-backed infrastructure and institutional alignment, the other in libertarian individualism and platform-based disruption.⁴⁰

Yet if Musk’s attempt to obstruct the deal revealed the intensity of competition among America’s AI elite, the scale of what was announced during the tour made clear that the real center of gravity was no longer in California boardrooms but in Gulf capitals. By lifting restrictions on chip exports just before landing in the Gulf, Trump turned semiconductor access into a diplomatic instrument, a bargaining chip in both senses of the term, and opened the floodgates to a new era of AI-driven infrastructure alliances. Altogether, over $2 trillion in deals were announced across data centers, semiconductor sales, logistics corridors, port infrastructure, and military tech—a number contested by skeptics and yet too massive to ignore.⁴¹

Already, over 3.3 gigawatts of AI-oriented compute power is in the pipeline across the Gulf, a staggering figure that signals a structural reordering of global digital infrastructure.⁴² The UAE alone is building a vast five gigawatt AI campus under the Stargate UAE banner, with the first two hundred megawatts of capacity going live in 2026.⁴³ Saudi Arabia, for its part, has secured a parallel five hundred megawatts in buildouts through its sovereign AI firm, Humain, via partnerships with Nvidia and AMD.⁴⁴ Additional projects, including Qualcomm’s codevelopment agreement and Amazon’s “AI Zone,” are expected to add another three hundred to five hundred megawatts.⁴⁵ Thus, the Gulf is emerging as a sovereign compute corridor: a region where energy systems, capital flows, chip diplomacy, and model training capacity are boldly tied together. Indeed, the United States, for all its tech innovation, lacks the power and space to train models at planetary scale without choking its grid. The Gulf provides the chassis. What began as a workaround for limited domestic grid flexibility has become a geopolitical pivot, one that redefines the geopolitics of artificial intelligence.

At stake for these monarchies is a post-oil future built on their role as command nodes in the emerging compute economy. This vision is not merely one of rebranding but of transformation. For over a century, Gulf states exported raw hydrocarbons, at best adding value through refining. Now, for the first time, they are laying the groundwork to burn that energy in-house to power AI superclusters and export computation via fiber-optic cables. If realized, it would mark a leapfrog moment: skipping over the industrial and digital revolutions to land directly in the AI era. Instead of shipping barrels, they would ship inference at scale. The deals signed during Trump’s recent visit do not guarantee this future, but they enable Gulf leaders to imagine it. If successful, it would amount to a profound shift in the political economy of the Persian Gulf from resource rentierism to infrastructural centrality in the world’s most advanced economic sector.

Trump’s real genius, then, was in recognizing the alignment of interests. American AI firms needed infrastructure. The Gulf needed relevance. India, with its logistics muscle and talent pool, needed a compute backbone. IMEC, once a diplomatic artifact of the Biden era, was repurposed into a Trump-era nucleus for compute, crypto, and control, bypassing multilateral roadblocks and redirecting flows through a new architecture of power.

Even Syria and Turkey, long considered geopolitical headaches, were suddenly back in the room. On May 14, 2025, while visiting Riyadh, President Trump held a surprise meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new leader, whose forces had ousted the Assad regime just months earlier. The encounter, unthinkable until recently, took place alongside Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and included Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan via phone. Trump used the occasion to announce the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria, citing Sharaa’s potential and pledges of normalization. This shift was greeted with jubilation in Damascus and framed by the White House as a diplomatic breakthrough.⁴⁶ While Syria is not yet formally part of the IMEC, the meeting signaled a readiness to align. Turkey, for its part, has expressed interest in alternative connectivity projects but remains pivotal to all east–west trade routes across the region.⁴⁷ Taken together, these developments suggest the corridor could snake around old obstacles and even leave Israel on the margins as the corridor finds new footing through Syria and Turkey en route to Europe.

A Corridor without a Bureaucracy

Trump’s return to power did not abolish the logic of Biden’s IMEC initiative. Rather, it reprogrammed it. The original IMEC plan aimed to align U.S.-friendly states in the Gulf, India, and Europe through physical trade infrastructure: railways, ports, and regulatory harmonization. It was designed as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, connecting India to a Western trading bloc. But under Trump, and through the influence of Sam Altman, this vision was retrofitted with a digital superstructure. Altman’s intervention offered Gulf leaders a pathway to diversification: they could hope to make their region not just a transit hub for goods but a global hub of AI production and compute. This pivot didn’t negate the Gulf’s infrastructure ambitions, it expanded them. In Altman’s hands, the IMEC map was layered with additional imperatives: data centers as well as ports, sovereign AI zones alongside free trade corridors, liquid cooling stations next to container terminals.

What emerged from this fusion of corridor geopolitics and digital ambition was not just a policy shift but an operational triangle of power, capital, and access. The Trump-Altman vision depended on the coordination of three actors: U.S.-based AI firms in search of infrastructure and funding, Gulf monarchies eager to reposition themselves as indispensable nodes in the global tech economy, and a Trump family empire that straddled both politics and business.

This alliance has achieved staggering velocity. Gulf sovereign wealth funds now bankroll data centers, chip deals, crypto ventures, and real estate branded by the Trump Organization. AI firms gain capital and regulatory havens. Gulf monarchs secure access to otherwise restricted technology. And Trump reaps the political and financial rewards of acting as matchmaker-in-chief. The strategy delivers for all three sides of the triangle, but the very speed and flexibility that make it so effective also expose its limits. Beneath its coherence lies a deeper fragility: a system defined by speed but hollowed out in its capacity to govern.

Most striking is the contradiction between the coalition’s ambitions and its institutional tools. The entire model is built on bypassing the state: private equity replaces diplomacy, crypto transactions circumvent the banking system, fiber cables and next-generation data centers stand in for treaties and embassies. The coalition runs on velocity, but infrastructure requires durability. Ports, corridors, cables, and compute campuses cannot be run on Signal chats and licensing contracts alone. They demand oversight, regulation, dispute resolution, and long-term coordination, which are all functions that the Trump coalition not only neglects but often openly disdains.

These tensions erupted into full view during the Red Sea crisis of March 2025, when Houthi missile and drone attacks on commercial shipping resumed in response to renewed Israeli bombing of Gaza. Insurance rates soared and ship movements through the Red Sea straits ground to a halt.⁴⁸

Within days, the Trump administration launched Operation Rough Rider, a sweeping air and naval campaign targeting Houthi infrastructure in Yemen. But behind the scenes, internal divisions paralyzed the administration. Vice President JD Vance urged delay, warning that the operation could spike oil prices, contradict Trump’s economic messaging, and alienate voters. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth pushed for immediate strikes, arguing that hesitation would project weakness. The debate played out not in a secure war room but on an encrypted Signal chat, to which National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, in a catastrophic lapse, had mistakenly added Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.

The ensuing leak, quickly dubbed “Signalgate,” revealed not only sensitive war plans and CIA operations but also a startling disdain for U.S. allies.⁴⁹ Trump’s team openly discussed sending Europe and Egypt the bill for defending Red Sea commerce and mocked European leaders as freeloaders. The episode exposed a deeper contradiction: even as the administration sought to dominate global trade corridors, it remained deeply ambivalent about alliances, entanglements, and the governing apparatus such projects require.

Moreover, this corridor-first doctrine is no longer confined to the Gulf. It now serves as a template the administration is attempting to replicate across multiple regions. Just as the IMEC initiative was retooled to counter China’s Belt and Road push across Eurasia, recent developments suggest a similar playbook is unfolding in Latin America.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has proposed converting Paraguay’s surplus electricity, generated by the Itaipu Dam, into a strategic asset for powering U.S.-aligned data centers and AI infrastructure.⁵⁰ Rising U.S. assertiveness comes as China expands its own foothold in the region through the Central Bi-Oceanic Railway Corridor, a BRI-linked megaproject aimed at connecting Brazil’s Atlantic coast with Chile’s Pacific ports via Paraguay and Argentina.⁵¹ Rubio’s initiative reimagines Latin America’s logistical geography not as a Chinese corridor but as an American compute zone: an infrastructural realignment echoing the Gulf model, where energy, geography, and AI interlock to reassert U.S. dominance across a new axis of influence. This brings us back to Sam Altman.

Like Henry Kissinger under Nixon, Altman functions as the shadowy brain trust behind a transformative administration, an unelected architect offering a grand vision of global order. For Kissinger, it was détente; for Altman, it is global AI availability. Both advanced a vision of international cooperation. But while Kissinger was a public servant who implemented policy through the state apparatus, Altman is a private entrepreneur whose strategy depends on dismantling that very apparatus and outsourcing infrastructure diplomacy to the corporate world. Kissinger dealt in treaties, balance-of-power logic, and statecraft rooted in legal and diplomatic institutions. Altman, by contrast, deals in technology and infrastructure. His levers of influence are not embassies or communiqués but data centers, sovereign AI zones, and capital flows routed through the Gulf. Kissinger could impose order through state-to-state alignment; Altman seeks to impose order by engineering the terrain on which AI, capital, and energy move.

And if Kissinger was the mind behind Nixon’s statecraft, Altman effectively plays the same role for Trump, but he does this in a register suited to the new age. He didn’t flatter Trump or fundraise for him. He didn’t need to. What Altman offered was more valuable: a blueprint that monetized Gulf ambition, validated Trump’s tech nationalism, and yielded billions in side deals for the Trump Organization. Where the flamboyant Elon Musk delivered chaos and cutback theatrics, Sam Altman, with far less political visibility, offered discipline and direction, an infrastructure vision cloaked in start-up rhetoric. His plan turned deregulation into revenue and personal enrichment into geopolitical alignment.

In the end, Trump listened to Altman not out of loyalty but utility. Altman didn’t need to donate, because he designed the game. He didn’t work for the state; he just rerouted it. And in doing so, he turned America’s postliberal twilight into a launchpad for an AI empire.

Coda: “The Twelve-Day War” and Beyond

The June 2025 war between Israel and Iran, triumphantly dubbed “the Twelve-Day War” by Trump after U.S. intervention seemed to bring it to an end, further clarified the geopolitical logic underlying the president’s Middle East strategy. Having digitized IMEC and tied it to a wider network of AI infrastructure, Trump treated the Iranian threat not merely as a nuclear or military challenge but as a disruption to a lucrative and strategically vital trade corridor. In early 2025, his administration made a surprising overture: a return to the Obama-era JCPOA framework, with vague but public hints of U.S. support for Iran’s civilian nuclear development. But when diplomacy failed—Trump recently called Iran “the primary problem”—he gave the green light for Israel’s long-planned strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

While Israel led the campaign, Trump sought to limit its scope, pushing for a rapid, high-impact operation focused on military and nuclear targets. Israeli attacks on Iranian oil and gas infrastructure were few and far between, likely due to direct instructions from Washington. Trump did authorize the use of Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) on the nuclear facility at Fordow, but even this move provided Israel with an off-ramp: it could claim to have neutralized Iran’s core nuclear sites without escalating further. After nearly two weeks of war, the United States was able to broker a ceasefire on terms that left Iran bruised but not defeated. Crucially, the conflict never spread to the Gulf‑based infrastructure now central to IMEC. In effect, Trump’s goal was not regime change but discipline: to reduce Iran’s leverage over Eurasian trade and to reopen the door to Israeli-Arab normalization.

If Trump’s gamble pays off, the 2025 war may come to be seen as a turning point for IMEC, an event that cleared the path for the corridor’s southern leg. But the risks of this strategy remain profound. By embedding critical AI infrastructure—data centers, fiber lines, and energy hubs—inside a volatile region, the United States has created a new set of strategic vulnerabilities. While Iran’s retaliation was relatively muted, the possibility remains that a future adversary, or proxy backed by Russia, China, or Iran, could target these nodes directly, turning economic arteries into geostrategic chokepoints. Trump’s infrastructure-first vision of power requires not just deals and capital, but constant defense. And that defense extends beyond military bases to the very cables, servers, and generators that now define U.S. influence and technological power. The threat from Tehran’s INSTC project hasn’t disappeared, either; it remains a rival corridor: slower, more analog, but politically aligned against Washington.

If the vision now shared by Trump and Altman succeeds, it will be because the president and the tech mogul found a way to turn the Middle East into a stable platform for a game-changing technology. If it fails, it may be because they placed the AI age’s central nervous system inside one of the world’s oldest powder kegs.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025): 3–24.

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Notes