The Hidden Architecture of the Future World Order: How Global Corporations Are Building the Age of AI
A World Distracted by Wars
Wars fill our screens. Every bulletin shows arrows on maps, sombre faces, promises of victory.
Citizens are told these are the struggles that will define our age. Yet while attention is drawn to battlefields, something else — quieter, but far more decisive — is being constructed.
Not by soldiers. Not even by parliaments. By corporations, engineers and policymakers working behind closed doors.
What they are building is the foundation of a technological world order where artificial intelligence, energy and infrastructure matter more than borders.
As I often remind colleagues: “Wars distract, but infrastructure decides.”
The Hidden Mechanisms of Power
Power rests on two things: control of resources and control of perception. Both are being rewritten.
Resources are no longer coal or oil alone. They are AI data centres, semiconductor fabs and floating nuclear power plants.
Perception is shaped not by newspapers but by endless news cycles that feed citizens wars and crises, keeping them engaged while capital moves elsewhere.
Fear and outrage serve as useful currencies. They justify urgency, grant emergency powers, and make populations accept rapid changes. While people argue about sanctions or borders, long-term contracts for copper, rare earth metals and energy are quietly signed.
As one policymaker told me: “In war you can pass in weeks what would take a decade in peace.”
Data Centres: Factories of the 21st Century
Every industrial age has had its factories. In the nineteenth century it was textile mills; in the twentieth, car plants and oil refineries. Today, the factories are data centres.
Windowless, humming, consuming more electricity than small cities. A single hyperscale facility may hold hundreds of thousands of servers and draw millions of litres of water each day for cooling. And yet hundreds more are rising worldwide.
The builders are not states or banks, but technology giants. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are spending tens of billions a year to secure land, energy and cables. For them, computation is not just infrastructure — it is power.
As I tell investors: “The boardrooms of Google and Microsoft are closer to the command centres of tomorrow than any ministry of finance.”
The Energy Bottleneck
Energy is the limiting factor. Without it, no amount of chips or algorithms will matter.
Renewables help but are intermittent. Batteries stabilise, but only briefly. Fossil fuels are politically costly.
The reality: the AI boom is colliding with the limits of modern grids.
Here Russia becomes central. Through Rosatom it remains the world’s most experienced builder of nuclear reactors.
More striking: it leads in floating nuclear power plants. The Akademik Lomonosov has powered Chukotka since 2019. A new generation of mobile reactors is already planned, each able to supply industry or cities for decades.
And Russia is not just energy. It is a warehouse of critical minerals: copper, gold, rare earths. Metals without which no server farm or fibre corridor can exist.
“Russia’s real power lies not in its armies, but in its reactors and resources. It holds both the energy and the elements of the future.”
The United States and MAGA Rewritten
“MAGA” once meant factories, tariffs and walls. Today it is being rewritten in silicon.
Donald Trump has promised to unleash artificial intelligence as America’s new engine. Beneath the rhetoric of jobs and sovereignty lies an infrastructural strategy: control the data centres, secure the energy, tie up the minerals.
Microsoft is pouring billions into new server clusters across Iowa and Virginia. Google expands its European cloud hubs. Amazon Web Services builds sovereign cloud zones for defence. This is America’s new industrial base — not steel mills, but server halls.
In 2019, the Trump administration even floated the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark. At the time it seemed eccentric. In hindsight, it was a signal: Washington saw the Arctic not as ice and emptiness, but as infrastructure.
“MAGA in its second act is not about walls or wars. It is about wires, watts and the will to dominate the technological age.”
Iceland and the Arctic: The New Server Frontier
Geography matters again. Cold climates, abundant water, political stability — these are the new oil fields of the technological world order.
Iceland is almost ideal. Its climate reduces cooling costs. Its rivers power reliable hydropower. Subsea cables connect it to Europe and North America. What once made it a Cold War outpost now makes it a natural hub for AI data centres.
With floating nuclear power plants stationed offshore to provide baseload, Iceland could anchor hyperscale clusters — the “AI hub of the North”.
This is not fantasy. It is convergence: American corporations seeking stable regions, European grids offering renewables, Russian engineers capable of supplying mobile reactors. Iceland, in that map, is not periphery. It is connective tissue between the United States and Europe.
“The maps of tomorrow will not show borders, but cables and cooling lines. In that cartography, Iceland is prime real estate.”
China in the Middle, Russia as the Balancer
China aims to lead in AI. It invests heavily in chips, supercomputers, cloud platforms. Yet it faces barriers: power shortages, reliance on coal, and U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors.
Here Russia plays balancer. With its nuclear expertise and mineral reserves, it can lean west or east, depending on terms. For Washington, partnership offers secure energy. For Beijing, it offers lifelines around sanctions.
“Russia will not lead the technological order, but it may decide who does.”
Thus, China risks being powerful but constrained. Too strong to ignore, but not yet strong enough to set the rules.
The Copper Age of AI
Every revolution has its resource. Steam had coal. Oil defined the twentieth century. The AI era will be remembered as the Copper Age.
One hyperscale data centre contains hundreds of thousands of kilometres of copper cabling. Multiply by hundreds of new facilities, add electric vehicles and renewable grids, and the scale is staggering. Demand for copper, rare earths and gold is set to soar.
Governments now list these as critical resources. Mining contracts once overlooked are treated as strategic. Investors race to lock in supplies.
As I often say: “If the twentieth century was written in oil, the twenty-first will be wired in copper.”
And again, Russia holds some of the largest reserves. Without its copper, rare earths and gold, the infrastructure of AI cannot be built at scale.
From War Economy to Tech Economy
The twentieth century was defined by the military-industrial complex. Defence spending drove innovation, created jobs, justified whole industries.
The twenty-first is shifting. Capital now flows into data centres, semiconductors, nuclear and renewable grids. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta invest more each year in AI infrastructure than many weapons programmes receive. Global spending on data centres is set to exceed $200 billion annually by the decade’s end.
Where once a military base guaranteed work, now a server park does the same. Defence secures borders; data centres secure prosperity.
“In the past, factories built weapons to win wars. Today, factories build servers to win markets — and markets decide the future.”
Afterword — What We Must Decide
This architecture is not speculative. It is already rising: server farms in cold valleys, reactors in shipyards, contracts for copper and rare earth metals signed behind closed doors. Wars may shape borders; infrastructure will shape society.
Power will flow less from parliaments than from those who own and standardise systems: platforms that host our communications, grids that allocate power, and corporations that knit these layers together. “The new world is being built not by parliaments, but by corporations. Governments merely sign the contracts.”
Each industrial revolution improved living standards yet reduced autonomy. Steam bound workers to factories. Oil tied nations to geopolitics. Electricity centralised daily life. Artificial intelligence will follow the same path — unless we design against it.
And there is a price. If this technological world order advances under the logic of corporate capitalism, efficiency will arrive with oversight. Privacy, meaningful consent, even aspects of due process may shrink. That is the trade-off.
“Prosperity at scale tends to centralise power; in corporate capitalism, control arrives first and freedoms catch up — if they ever do.”
The task is not to resist progress, but to guide it. Nations must legislate with foresight and insist on transparency; companies must pursue legitimacy, not only profit; citizens must remain vigilant so that technology serves freedom rather than erodes it.
“Wars will continue to distract. Infrastructure will endure. And in that endurance, the real world order of the twenty-first century is already being decided.”
