Dollar Supremacy Strategy or All-Time Grift? American AI Imperialism’s Reliance on the Middle East 

The AI “revolution” needed capital, land, and loads of power. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were happy to provide all three.

In 2024 before the arrival of Trump 2.0 the big American AI players began deepening their relationships with Persian Gulf capital, which began to invest heavily in data centers and other AI infrastructure. But the relationship has really taken off under the current administration that saw a path to reward its Silicon Valley and Zionist backers, immense personal enrichment, and a Hail Mary pass for an empire on its last legs.

The US is now all in on a Persian Gulf partnership that envisions a new stablecoin dollar supremacy and brings with it off-the-charts corruption and genocides, but everyone in on the game is getting fabulously wealthy and they believe the partnership will lead to a never-ending winning streak.

Will it work, and what does it mean for the future of West Asia, as well as the American political economy? Let’s take a look.

The Wedding of Silicon Valley and the Persian Gulf

In November, the US and Saudi Arabia signed their Strategic Artificial Intelligence Partnership, the latest in an ever-deepening AI relationship with the Gulf states. A similar agreement was reached with the UAE in May. And so the US has now agreed to export up to 70,000 advanced Nvidia chips to the two countries.

The deals marked an abrupt shift from previous American efforts to restrict export of such tech out of fear it would end up in China. The Trump administration instead argues that the arrangement will “promote continued American AI dominance and global technological leadership.”

The agreements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE also involve them supposedly investing trillions in the US, but I wouldn’t bank on any upgrades to your local infrastructure. Mostly we’ve seen lists of partnerships with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Adobe, Qualcomm, Microsoft, AMD, Cisco, GlobalAI, Groq, Luma, and xAI. And there are investments for US data centers and accompanying liquefied natural gas facilities and specialty chemical plants for cooling. Swell. So in reality, these investments damage the environment, use up scarce water resources, and strengthen the oligarchic forces in the US that strangle any hint of social policy intended to benefit the working class or check billionaire power. But I digress.

Let’s take in the sheer scale of the efforts taking place in the Gulf itself. Here’s Guy Laron writing at American Affairs Journal:

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.

Here’s more on what the Middle East can offer, courtesy of Edward Ongweso, Jr.:

Europe pays $0.29 per kWh, the U.S. averages $0.17, but the Gulf’s unsubsidized power costs average $0.10 per kWh. Through “centralized planning and execution” the GCC might be able to build out power infrastructure rapidly: the Kingdom plans to add 42 GW of gas capacity by 2030, outpacing the United States by 40 percent.

Second is by a geographical advantage. The Gulf sits at the crossroads of three continents and an extensive submarine cable network, meaning it can service four billion internet users within 100 millisecond latency—the threshold that lets AI interactions feel “instantaneous.” If that is not enough, the region has the world’s largest desalination infrastructure (40 percent of global desalinated water). Geographically, it’s well suited to serve the world’s inference workloads and provide more than enough water to cool power-intensive A.I. data centers as the overbuild continues along.

There’s also a financial advantage: a nearly $5 trillion sovereign wealth fund war chest that is a bit more patient than ravenous Western financiers.

In light of the US bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, it should be noted there are similar designs for Latin America. Spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Washington is eyeing the region’s energy, mineral, and water resources to power AI infrastructure and box out Beijing.

Dollar Supremacy and Accelerationists’ Vision of the Future

Chip restrictions were widely believed to be ineffective. They were still getting to China, and regardless, the Chinese were going to catch up at some point anyways. So the US calculus changed to a strategy to get more nations—and especially Middle East capital rich ones—locked into the American tech. Why is that?

According to Navin Girishankar, president of the Economic Security and Technology Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), it has to do with a vision for dollar/stablecoin supremacy.

This is above my pay grade, but Girishankar is funded by the likes of  the Smith Richardson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Charles Koch Foundation, Bank of America Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, BP, Citigroup, Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Raytheon Company, Amazon, Apple, IBM, and Disney, so he’s probably more in the know. He writes:

Access to American compute power will enable both Gulf countries to export AI-enabled goods and services in sectors such as autonomous logistics, precision agriculture, medical diagnostics, and finance.

The Trump administration aims to ensure that “American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide,” according to Vice President JD Vance. But these agreements miss an essential ingredient of American power: a guarantee that AI-enabled exports generated using American chips will be invoiced and settled in dollars.

…the United States should condition access to leading-edge chips on binding commitments to settle AI-enabled exports in dollars…the United States should use dollar-backed stablecoins as the settlement mechanism.

And the vision for a future dollar is accompanied by Silicon Valley enthusiasm for the philosophy of political economy present in the Gulf.

As the UAE takes the crown of crypto capital, it’s become something of a model for how American oligarchs would like to see the US rearranged: regulation-free, virtually unlimited sovereign capital, low tax, and governed by a techno monarchy.

Think more dismantled nations, plundered for human and natural resources, and then reconstructing profitable segments of them under the oversight of financial, real estate, energy, and tech barons. Think about what the post-genocide vision of Gaza looks like: 

Grifting While the Grifting Is Good 

The wonderful thing about the Middle East is there’s always boatloads of money to spread around for the military-industrial-tech complex, the professional managerial class, and with the monarchs vying for control of the AI pipelines, plenty of opportunity for crypto corruption.

So we see spooky grifters like Brett McGurk who used to lead the global “fight” against ISIS now helping companies—and getting fabulously wealthy doing it— strike billion-dollar AI deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

We see the PMC thrown some coins with investments like Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, which now has a satellite lab in Sunnyvale, California.

And we see corruption on a whole new scale, exemplified by the Commander in Chief and his family. “Digital assets” are now reportedly  “one of the single biggest, if not the single biggest,” money streams for the Trump family. Eric Trump’s World Liberty Financial has a $2 billion deal with the UAE state-owned AI investment firm MGX, which has rights to the Trump stablecoin USD1. MGX uses it for billions in transactions on Binance, the exchange constantly on the wrong side of what used to be the law and whose founder, Changpeng Zhao, received a pardon from Trump in October after pleading guilty to failing to prevent money laundering in 2023.

It’s quite the racket, and as George Carlin would it’s quite the big club. To Girishankar’s above suggestion that this stablecoin corruption becomes the new model for dollar supremacy, it would seem there’s quite a bit of work to do in order to make it semi-legitimate, but what do I know? Here’s more from Guy Laron:

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.

What could be better for the American ruling class than a dollar supremacy brainchild that also turbocharges personal enrichment for elected officials and imperial aparatchiks?

There are just, well, a lot of problems with this plan, including the AI bubble, environmental limitations, the fact that all this AI infrastructure will be in the Middle East tinderbox—which includes the UAE and Saudi Arabia increasingly at one another’s throats—and more. We’ll take a look at those issues on Wednesday, as well as examining what exactly Israel’s role is in this grand scheme.