Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
Being a perpetual student all my life, I have watched the
world reorganize itself around new centers of power. Growing up as a refugee in
Lebanon taught me early that global forces shape the fate of individuals and
nations in ways that are often invisible until they suddenly become decisive.
When I later founded TAG.Global as one of the Arab region’s first knowledge‑based
institutions, I did so because I believed that intellectual capital would
eventually outweigh natural resources as the foundation of progress. Today,
this is the ability to generate and control compute technology stack, which
includes advanced chips, AI models, cloud infrastructures, energy capacity and
high performance computing clusters. The nations that design and control these
will be the ones that will define their future.
I remember visiting China in the 1980s at a time when the
world feared its dominance in electronics. What impressed me most was not the
scale of China’s factories but the discipline of its long‑term planning and its
commitment to research. That same mindset now characterizes the countries that
lead in computing. The US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and some others have
built ecosystems so advanced that the rest of the world depends on them for the
chips that drive everything from communication networks to national security
systems. This has now become a geopolitical and strategic dependency that is
rewriting the world.
In recent years, I have spoken with tech leaders across
the Arab world who express concern that their countries are becoming
enthusiastic adopters of AI without building the infrastructure required to
shape it. I often recall a moment early in my career when I realized that relying
on others for intellectual property would keep our region permanently behind.
That realization led me to establish the Arab world’s first organization
dedicated to protecting intellectual property, AGIP. The same principle applies
today. If we do not build our own computational capacity, we will remain
dependent on those who do.
Data centers have become the industrial zones of the
digital age. Nations that once competed to host factories, now compete to host
cloud infrastructure. Yet hosting is not the same as owning, as the party that
owns the technology, not the one that hosts it, sets the rules. A country that
provides land and energy for foreign platforms gains employment opportunities,
but it does not gain sovereignty. True power lies in controlling the data, the
models, and the computational capacity that shape national decision‑making.
This emerging divide is particularly dangerous for the
Global South. Many developing nations are embracing AI without building the
foundations needed to produce them. When a country depends on external
platforms for education, healthcare, economic forecasting, and public
administration, it risks outsourcing its future. I have seen this pattern
before. Nations that rely on imported knowledge rarely become producers of
innovation. Computational dependency is simply the newest expression of this
old challenge.
Despite these risks, I remain optimistic. The Global
South, and the Arab region in particular, has a historic opportunity. We
possess the energy resources, the geographic position, and the financial
capacity to become a global hub for computing. I often think back to the early
days of establishing TAG.Global, when resources were limited but ambition was
abundant. That spirit of building despite obstacles is exactly what our region
needs today.
Countries that recognize computational power as a
strategic resource will secure their place in the future. Those that delay will
find themselves permanently dependent on the technological decisions of others,
swaying under the influence of a new form of control, which I will call compute
colonialism. Sovereignty in the twenty‑first century will belong to those who
can think, compute, and innovate for themselves, with the greatest capacity to
generate and direct computational power.