Geopolitics of AI Empires

Everyone is hunting chokepoints now. Washington warns allies against depending on China while looking for ways to exploit their dependence on the American market, technology and dollar. Beijing answers with rare earths. Iran eyes the Strait of Hormuz. A recent Foreign Affairs essay by Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman and Yeling Tan calls the result a chokepoint trap: each state’s effort to make itself safer makes others feel less safe, and since restraint invites victimhood, the likeliest outcome is a fragmented, volatile world. Artificial intelligence is the biggest chokepoint stack ever built. Niall Ferguson, Lisa Klaassen and Eric Schmidt argue that America and China have become AI empires, with dominion over the models, chips, minerals and capital everyone else needs. Pax Silica, the US-led coalition on chips and critical minerals, was launched last December, and India joined in February. Experts highlight Pakistan’s growing vitamin D crisis at Lahore summit Countries like Pakistan are often seen as ‘takers’ in the global order. While this may be true in an economic sense, it is an inaccurate description of the state itself. Empires depend on scarce inputs and demand allegiance, yet Pakistan holds more cards than it plays. Strategically, it is uniquely positioned at the crossroads of South Asia, the Gulf, Central Asia and China. As a nuclear-armed state, it has also secured mutual defence agreements with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye. Furthermore, its resource potential is growing; the first mineral shipment under a US memorandum moved in October 2025, alongside its vast hydropower capabilities and a young, dynamic market. Finally, Pakistan maintains a strong diplomatic record, having argued for years that machines should not decide who lives or dies. PTV Drama, Film Academy to be revived with modern training facilities: Tarar It remains to be seen how Pakistan plays the situation. Data Vault Pakistan runs a sovereign cloud on about 3, 000 Nvidia GPUs obtained through US-approved channels, while Gul Ahmed Energy Group is building a Huawei data centre worth up to USD 600 million. One track is American, the other Chinese, and nobody has said whether this is a strategy or an accident. Pakistan spends an estimated USD 700 to 800 million a year on foreign computing resources and negotiates each deal separately, like a buyer. That is the behaviour gap, and it is a gap of policy, not of position. Snow and rain forecast across Kazakhstan on November 3–5 In a chokepoint trap, the danger for a mid-sized, dollar-dependent state lies less in being directly targeted than in becoming collateral damage. Because foreign rules are often written ambiguously, banks, vendors and cloud providers tend to over-comply, leaving the end user to bear the costs. Therefore, Pakistan needs a dedicated sanctions and export-control interpretation unit, a robust compliance firewall between American and Chinese systems, and a clear-headed review of its leverage. A true chokepoint requires a near-monopoly with no easy substitutes; consequently, Pakistan’s minerals and geography should be viewed as bargaining chips to secure refining capabilities and technical skills, not as strategic weapons. LHC orders meeting between Noreen Niazi, her daughters Wall Street is nervous. Oracle had its worst week since the dot-com bust in June, down 19 per cent in five days, and the five largest US companies are worth about USD 18 trillion while borrowing to fund AI. The labour market is moving before any crash: Barclays has cut around 5, 000 jobs in an efficiency drive and is reportedly using AI and offshoring to India to deliver a GBP 2 billion savings plan. For Pakistan, that cuts both ways, since the tools that make offshoring cheaper can also replace the offshored roles. Add Washington’s H-1B crackdown, which has cut new approvals from nearly 140, 000 in 2024 to around 52, 000, and a year in which entry-level hiring at major Pakistani tech firms fell by a quarter even as IT exports hit USD 4. 6 billion. A state needs a corporate IT base, not just gig income. Punjab appoints ADCs as focal persons to facilitate businesses, attract investment Yet the trap is not destiny. In their new Foreign Affairs essay, ‘AI Is a Choice’, Alex Imas, Mohamed El-Erian and James Manyika argue that AI is a cooperative game, as the biggest gains arise only when many groups coordinate and last only when each expects to do better inside the coalition than outside. Globalisation’s lesson is that gains spread widely while losses concentrate, causing public trust to collapse; for instance, 70 per cent of Americans oppose data centres in their own neighbourhoods. The authors also find that access to AI has spread much faster than adoption, with only about a fifth of tasks in a typical occupation substantially affected so far. For Pakistan, the bottleneck is domestic, spanning federal and provincial bodies, employers, universities and communities. Each player holds a piece of the puzzle, but nobody is there to coordinate them. Therefore, Pakistan should aim for deep adoption in a few auditable systems, such as tax, procurement and audit. Alongside this, Pakistan should demand community benefit agreements covering power, jobs and skills before any data centre is built, while linking training targets to real employer demand. The same logic applies abroad. Farrell and his co-authors say escaping the trap requires credible assurances, not just credible threats, and middle powers are well placed to supply them. The Saudi-Pakistan-Türkiye defence pact shows that Pakistan can build binding relationships outside both empires. Along with Gulf partners, Türkiye and others, Pakistan can push for transparency in export-control rules and shared safeguards. In South Asia, where India’s drones and AI-enabled surveillance are rapidly compressing decision times between nuclear-armed neighbours, a published position on human control of AI-enabled weapons would turn Pakistan’s long-standing advocacy for a ban into a doctrine. None of this works without institutions, because empires operate through local intermediaries who profit from concession terms. We know the pattern from power and procurement: opaque contracts, elite-friendly terms and costs passed on to the public. Independent Power Producers were contracted without a coherent strategy, and citizens are being forced to pay capacity charges for electricity nobody asked for. Therefore, Pakistan, as a state, needs a concrete agenda. Create a single strategic authority for AI, backed by law and public reporting. Publish sovereignty red lines: military data, national identity systems, and tax and electoral records must never reside on a foreign technology stack. Subject every deal to audit, continuity and exit conditions, with all payments linked to prior and proper scrutiny. Tie every minerals memorandum to refining at home. And watch three tests: whether the authority and red lines exist on paper, how many contracts carry data-residency and exit protections, and whether communities hosting AI infrastructure share in the gains. The AI race is producing empires at machine speed. Their piling debts, markets and rivalries are making the order unstable. AI is a choice, and so is the order we build around it. It is not a separate policy problem. It is the same problem, wearing a new name. Manzoor MalikThe writer is a public policy professional and CEO of the Governance and Advocacy Foundation for Sustainable Development (GAFSD).

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