The age of AI empires

“AI HAS long ceased to be just technology; it is now infrastructure,” I said in a recent talk. “If it’s so important, why isn’t it making money?” somebody asked. Fair question. On paper, the investment in AI looks irrational. Billions are going in, with no clear profits coming out. Even Meta’s Reality Labs lost nearly $20bn last year alone.

So I told them a story. There was a time when railways looked like a terrible investment. Massive costs and slow returns. If you judged them by early balance sheets, you’d call it a failure. Rail was never about selling tickets but controlling movement, connecting economies, and unlocking industries. The money came later. The power came first. The people who understood that were concerned about control, not early profits.

Artificial intelligence feels eerily similar. Still framed as software and models, it is something far more physical. It runs on data centres that consume electricity at the scale of cities. It is an infrastructure that looks less like code and more like power grids, mines and industrial systems. And increasingly, executives at some of the largest technology companies are now acknowledging that the real constraint on AI is not innovation, but energy. Google’s leadership has warned that the US must significantly expand energy production to keep pace with AI demand, calling for the use of “all sources of energy”.

Tech companies are securing massive, long-term power deals while exploring private generation and reshaping where data centres are built based on access to electricity. They are projected to spend hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure, numbers that resemble national industrial programmes more than corporate expansion. These investments are already creating distortions: power shortages, delays in grid connections and a renewed reliance on fossil fuels to meet immediate demand.

Is America’s AI race accelerating a deeper obsession with energy security?

Which raises a question that feels uncomfortable, but difficult to ignore: is America’s AI race accelerating a deeper obsession with energy security, pulling it back towards regions like Iran and Venezuela, where control over oil and gas still shapes global power? The timing is difficult to dismiss.

The US is once again deeply entangled in regions at the heart of global energy flows. Iran remains central because of its position in the global oil system. Venezuela, with some of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, has re-emerged as a space of renewed strategic engagement. Individually, none of this is new. But in the context of an accelerating AI race, it invites a different question. The companies driving AI are building infrastructure that demands continuous, uninterrupted energy. Data centres are becoming the new industrial base, and they require constant power now.

Nuclear energy is often presented as the long-term answer. But reactors take years, often decades, to come online. AI demand is rising in real time. In the short to medium term, systems still lean heavily on natural gas, the fastest and most scalable way to generate reliable power. So the question sharpens: if the US needs immediate and stable energy to sustain its AI ambitions, does that reinforce the strategic importance of gas-rich regions? Does it make control over supply routes, chokepoints and reserves central again?

Here, the comparison with China becomes unavoidable. China has spent years building a structural advantage in clean energy, from solar manufacturing to battery production and critical mineral processing. It is not just producing energy; it is producing the systems that generate, store and distribute it. This creates a self-reinforcing ecosystem where technological ambition is backed by domestic capacity. The US, by contrast, appears to be pursuing a more immediate and diversified strategy, combining renewables, nuclear ambitions, and crucially, gas. This approach also sits comfortably with the current political emphasis under Donald Trump on expanding domestic fossil fuel production, particularly natural gas, as a response to rising energy demand.

The hypothesis begs another question: is America’s scramble for energy and resources being shaped as much by the need to power AI as by the need to keep pace with, or outmanoeuvre, China’s growing advantage? The ‘race’, if there’s one, has started to resemble the Cold War era ‘space race’, which was never just about rockets, but who could build and sustain the systems behind them. The ‘AI race’ may be unfolding in much the same way; not as a competition of models, but of energy systems, supply chains and infrastructure.

Which brings us back to Iran and Venezuela. Are they remnants of an older geopolitical order, or becoming newly relevant as sources of energy for a different kind of race? Is the renewed American focus still about oil as it once was, or is it now reinforced by the need to secure the physical foundations of AI, and perhaps counter China’s growing ecosystem? These are not assertions, but questions increasingly grounded in signals from industry and policy.

For us in Pakistan, they are not abstract. Recent analyses by Renewables First and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air suggest that our rapid solar adoption has already saved over $12bn in oil and gas imports since 2018. What looks like a response to rising electricity costs may, in fact, be doing something far more strategic, reducing our exposure to volatile global energy markets.

If AI is infrastructure, then energy is access, and if so, the kind of energy we build matters. While much of the world is scrambling for immediate, fossil-based power, our shift towards decentralised solar presents a different path, one where Pakistan’s AI ambitions are powered through locally generated, renewable energy. The question is whether we recognise this in time, or once again realise its value only after the moment has passed.

And yet, these are questions we rarely hear. Not because they lack importance, but because our mainstream media seldom connect technology with geopolitics in any meaningful way. Energy is discussed without AI, AI without infrastructure, and geopolitics without either. The result is silence at the intersections where power is being reshaped; questions left unasked and unanswered.

The writer is the founder of Media Matters for Democracy.

Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2026

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