The Leverage Middle Powers Have in the AI Race

Foreign Policy | Sam Winter-Levy, Anton Leicht

Allied democracies possess critical leverage to secure guaranteed access to frontier artificial intelligence systems as Washington increasingly restricts foreign deployment. The United States faces severe domestic constraints, including widespread public opposition to noisy energy-hungry construction projects, tightening grid capacity, and local permitting moratoriums spanning from New York to Texas.

Meanwhile, initial alternative plans to build massive computing hubs in the Gulf remain untenable following Iranian drone strikes that disabled Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Consequently, allied nations across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Nordics can leverage abundant land, reliable renewable energy, and existing security relationships to host U.S. data centers. In exchange for solving the industry's severe infrastructure shortfall, these middle powers can extract binding contractual guarantees for simultaneous access to advanced models and critical intelligence frameworks. This grand compute bargain directly addresses mounting fiscal pressures abroad while ensuring strategic technology sharing.

Comment

The structural bottleneck in the global artificial intelligence architecture is no longer exclusively algorithmic or capital-intensive, but fundamentally territorial and energetic. As commercial entities commit over $700 billion to domestic infrastructure, localized political backlash and grid saturation across jurisdictions like New York and Texas create severe physical friction points that standard market incentives cannot bypass. Washington's initial attempts to bypass these constraints through Middle Eastern hubs proved vulnerable to kinetic disruption, as demonstrated by the persistent offline status of Amazon facilities following Iranian drone strikes in the United Arab Emirates. Allied democracies possessing surplus renewable energy, such as the Nordics or Australia, therefore occupy a crucial strategic pivot point where physical site availability directly dictates frontier capability.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If physical infrastructure hosting becomes the primary mechanism for middle powers to extract technology-sharing guarantees from Washington, how durable are those contractual assurances against future emergency export controls enacted by the White House?

The trajectory of recent executive actions suggests that contractual guarantees would likely yield under acute national security pressures. Physical co-location provides essential leverage during peacetime expansion, but sovereign emergency authorities remain the ultimate arbiter during technological crunches.

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