The Geopolitics of Brands: How AI Turns Marketing Into a Global Power Game

Tech infuses politics, and politics influence tech. The best example today is the insatiable need for energy to power global data centers. This demand has forced tech leaders from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen to court presidents, prime ministers, and anyone who controls access to the modern currency of AI growth: electricity. Energy is now diplomacy.

Tariq Krim, founder of Cybernetica and one of the early pioneers of the Web 2.0 era, reminded us of this connection during his talk The Geopolitics of Intelligent Machines. He began by reflecting on his early web days, when the internet felt open, free, and full of possibility. Back then, you could build without permission. Today, every new venture must ask for it—from app stores, from APIs, from data centers, from the geopolitical blocs that now define access to compute power.

Since the advent of the internet, there have been only two real business models for tech. You either build on someone else’s infrastructure—an API from Google, Facebook, or OpenAI—or you create the entire thing yourself, which he calls a “full stack” company.

Neither path is without risk. Building on another company’s platform is convenient, but dangerous. Remember how Facebook once analyzed which companies were thriving on its API—and then copied them. On the other hand, going full stack requires immense resources, time, and, above all, independence—something rare in today’s startup environment where cloud rent is due every month. This applies to brands, too. Most companies now grow on platforms they don’t control—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. Your brand lives inside someone else’s ecosystem, subject to someone else’s rules. That’s the new normal.

We’re living in the age of cloud capital. Somewhere in massive, hidden data centers, software runs on CPUs and GPUs, and money flows in only one direction: up. You either pay the rent or collect it. For most companies, there’s no way around it. To integrate AI into an online store or marketing strategy, you don’t just pay rent for servers—you also pay rent to the AI models, to the APIs, to the tools that make it all work. The cloud created this dynamic. The AI revolution is amplifying it.

ABI Research anticipates 8,378 data centers will be in operation by 2030. Some see this as a realignment of capital; others see it as a speculative frenzy. But regardless of how you label it, the new AI economy is energy-hungry, data-hungry, and capital-intensive. The real power lies with those who control the hardware, the data, and the energy. AI is pushing CEOs and governments into new alliances—not for money or contracts, but for electricity. 

Innovation Divergence and AI Sovereignty

For decades, the Silicon Valley playbook dominated: invent in the U.S., scale globally, and the world follows. But that model is fracturing. Now, AI innovation is split between two poles—the U.S. and China. Each has its own vision of how intelligent machines should evolve, and each is pulling the rest of the world into its orbit.

This means brands and startups are now operating within the gravitational pull of geopolitics. Whether they like it or not, they must pick a camp—or learn to navigate both.

AI doesn’t just reshape economies; it rewrites how we think, work, and interact. Every prompt, every model, every line of code is part of a larger global struggle for influence, sovereignty, and power. Forget the old brick-and-mortar days. The new rent is digital. The new border is compute. And the new diplomacy runs on watts.