AI Is Becoming the New Infrastructure of International Order

E-International Relations  |  Martin Wählisch

The United Nations and NATO are formalizing artificial intelligence as a foundational infrastructure of twenty-first-century geopolitical order, redefining international security, military readiness, and global governance. Control over critical layers of the AI stack—including advanced semiconductor manufacturing, cloud compute, and frontier model development—now grants structural power that cuts across global security, production, finance, and knowledge creation.

This technological concentration alters traditional statecraft by forcing governments into structural dependencies on privately owned computational ecosystems and foreign technology firms. In the ongoing rivalry between the United States and China, strategic advantage depends less on isolated technological innovation than on establishing dominant infrastructure architectures and technical standards. While the European Union exercises regulatory influence through its AI Act, non-producing states increasingly risk losing sovereign autonomy without native compute capacity. Consequently, states like Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are embedding AI into core state functions to safeguard strategic autonomy.

Comment

The integration of commercial cloud environments into NATO's Allied Command Transformation creates an asymmetric operational dependency on US defense contractors. Member states participating in initiatives like the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic remain reliant on non-sovereign compute nodes for real-time data fusion. This technological divide limits the interoperability of allied command structures during high-intensity conflict if host-nation access to proprietary algorithms is restricted. Strategic cohesion within the alliance consequently hinges on shared infrastructure access rather than traditional force-pooling agreements under Article 5.

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