The U.S. government, the Pentagon and big tech: key components of U.S. imperialism. Part 1

Written by: Alex M. on 12 August 2026

 

An article in the Guardian’s online edition back in April revealed the blatant corruption of a U.S. official by the name of Emil Michael. 

Michael ‘is the Pentagon’s under-secretary for research and engineering under the Trump administration oversees negotiations with AI companies and has been pushing the defense department to rapidly increase the widespread use of AI’ (Guardian 10 April, 2026).  (1)

Prior to his appointment to the position, Michael owned shares in Elon Musk’s xAI, which is the entity behind Grok, the generative AI chatbot. Interestingly, xAI shares were not available on the open market, but Michael has a social connection with Musk and this may have facilitated Michael in acquiring the shares. Be that as it may, the register of Michael’s assets lists his holdings of xAI shares sitting in the range of US$500,000 to US$1,000,000. 

Here is where it gets decidedly tawdry: Michael made a couple of decisions in his capacity as a Pentagon official about Pentagon contracts that favoured Musk’s xAI. A complete conflict of interest. No surprises then that Michael has managed to get away with this blatant bit of corruption given the nature of the US government under Trump (not that things would be necessarily better under a Democrat president, but the Trump regime is notoriously corrupt).

Aside from the corruption, there is another thing to note and that is the intimate connection between the US government and Silicon Valley. The relationship has become even more intimate in the second Trump administration. Tech billionaires like Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Sam Altmann and others have either made donations to Trump’s 2024 election campaign or have made clear their support for the Trump presidency. 

Musk was appointed by Trump to oversee the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which despite its name, was not an official government department. DOGE, in its advisory capacity, did manage to bring about the slashing and gutting of U.S. government departments, their budgets and important programs, which did nothing to improve government efficiency. While Musk did not stay long at DOGE, nonetheless it highlights the strengthening of bonds between Silicon Valley tech billionaires and the U.S. government.

Trump’s regime has also smoothed the way for the ongoing hyper-scaling of AI by companies such as Altman’s Open AI and Anthropic led by Dario Amodei. These two corporations are in a self-imposed race to be the first to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), supposedly the equivalent of human intelligence. 

The quest seemingly requires inordinate amounts of what is called ‘compute’, the shorthand term for computer chips and associated hardware such as servers and so on. The company that makes the highly sought-after computer chips (GPUs) is Nvidia another Silicon Valley tech giant. As a consequence of the insatiable appetite for ‘compute’ and associated infrastructure such as data centres which have monstrous price tags, a financial bubble has arisen. 
The Silicon Valley AI boom is predicated on much touted gigantic future profits that will come with the widespread adoption of AI. So far none of the major AI corporations have shown the returns on investment that would indicate that massive profits will arise in the future, yet they clamour for more investment capital. Pundits suggest that the AI bubble will eventually burst, but when this will happen is unclear. 

Under the influence of the ‘tech bros’ of Silicon Valley the Trump regime has made sure that the AI juggernaut rolls on by removing any legislative or administrative obstacles to the further development of AI and its infrastructure (data centres etc). The US government also sees AI as a weapon or instrument to prop up flagging US hegemonic power across the globe. Hence the deals with the oil rich Gulf states between Open AI, Saudi Arabia and the UAE for example.

As Edward Ongweso Jr has detailed in a number of investigative pieces on the intimate relationships between AI firms, the oil rich states of the Arabian peninsula, the Trump administration and the AI financial bubble, there is an underlying strategy. That is, in order to continue U.S. imperialism’s status as the world’s Mafia don, the oil rich states will become one part of what Ongweso calls the Compute Axis. (2) The axis consists of ; ‘1) Silicon Valley and its capital-intensive dream of building God out of sand; 2) Trump and his brigands – concerned with transactional relationships, deregulation, and imperial plunder; 3) the sovereign capital of Gulf .’  (3) 

The oil rich states with their massive sovereign wealth funds have been looking to pivot into a post-oil future and Sam Altman of Open AI is always looking for trillions of dollars to fund his race to create AGI. Altman pitched a $US7 trillion plan to the Gulf monarchies where the energy supply and compute capacity build out would not be a problem, as there is more than enough fossil fuel energy and little to no civilian pushback on massive data centres. For their part, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are keen to embrace the U.S. led AI program. According to Ongweso, the Compute Axis has developed with astonishing speed:

Gulf sovereign wealth funds now bankroll data centers, chip deals, crypto ventures, and real estate branded by the Trump Organization. AI firms gain capital and regulatory havens. Gulf monarchs secure access to otherwise restricted technology. And Trump reaps the political and financial rewards of acting as matchmaker-in-chief.  (4)

The U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the Iranian response to those attacks, which, among other things, targeted Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, have perhaps put the plans of the Compute Axis on hold for the time being. What is certain is that despite the negative influence that the unprovoked and criminal attack on Iran has on the roll-out of the above plan, U.S. imperialism sees AI as an integral part of shoring up its hegemonic status. It is hell bent on heading off the challenge from another AI power, China.

In Part 2, the Pentagon’s intimate ties with big Tech will be examined.

 

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/09/pentagon-ai-xai-emil-michael 

(2) ‘The AI Bubble in 2026 Part 1: On the coming geopolitics of the compute stack, or Our New Imperial Strategy’ available here: https//www.thetechbubble.info/p/the-ai-bubble-in-2026-14 accessed 18 May 2026.

(3) ibid

(4) ibid

 

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