Who Controls the Data Controls the Future by Bijan Burnard

While AI is becoming increasingly central to finance, defense, health care, and public administration, it depends on resources most governments do not control: the data used to train it and the compute that processes it. Unless this changes, countries will remain subject to decisions made in boardrooms they cannot influence.

SAN FRANCISCO—In March, Iranian drones targeted three Amazon Web Services facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, hitting two directly and nearly hitting the third. It was the first time a commercial data center had been a military target, yet almost nobody outside specialist circles noticed. They should have. The servers holding a country’s data, and the chips running the AI models on which its economy increasingly leans, are no longer background infrastructure. They are as strategic as ports or power grids—and just as exposed.