32 nations, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, have A.I.-specialized data centers. NY Times | Source: Oxford University
AI is imperialism's newest weapon, automating genocide in Gaza while building a surveillance state domestically.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), or more accurately, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been on the tip of everyone’s tongues for the last few years. Responses to AI have ranged from elated excitement to declarations of demons residing in the computer. This article seeks to put forward a political economy of AI and discuss its role as the cornerstone of a ruling class economic strategy. In a previous article, I explained how the rapid construction of data centers to accommodate the expansion of AI is an example of lumpen development -– development which has no social benefit and reinforces the hyper-financialization inherent in the U.S., and “Israeli” economies. This article seeks to identify the place of AI within the grand strategy of imperialism – namely the modernization of warfare, mass surveillance, and financial speculation. As such, the attention to AI in Trump’s new budget overhaul is not an accident, but rather it is by design.
The development of AI technology serves — first and foremost -– a state security function on behalf of the imperialist powers. This technology has notably been on the forefront of the industrial scale holocaust being perpetrated against the people of Palestine. In a report by +972 Magazine, the main liberal Zionist opposition outlet:
According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
This technology essentially collates household data: family members, occupations, number of children, political affiliation and makes assumptions on who is a Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) member and then marks their home for bombing. This differs from The Gospel, another Zionist AI model which marked buildings as suspected centers of resistance activity and thus, for bombing. The Zionist intelligence officials who spoke to +972 said that they gave carte blanche acceptance of AI generated kill lists, usually within 20 seconds of the petition for approval. In the United States, a similar AI military industrial complex exists, with companies like Anthropic and Palantir teaming up to take military contracts. In June of this year, Anthropic released their “Claude Gov” AI model for exclusive use by US defense contractors and intelligence agencies. According to an article on ARS Technica, Claude Gov can:
handle classified material, "refuse less" when engaging with classified information, and are customized to handle intelligence and defense documents. The models also feature what Anthropic calls "enhanced proficiency" in languages and dialects critical to national security operations.
Anthropic is also noted for their attempt to recreate the human brain via AI. With all that said, Anthropic is just one player in an ever expanding chess board. Palantir, Microsoft, Anduril, Google, Amazon Web Services, and OpenAI are among the other companies which straddle the war making–surveillance-enhancing niche in the imperialist economies of the 21st century.
Palantir and Anduril are two of the most powerful AI companies who are being courted with multi-billion dollar military contracts. Palantir and Anduril are also names taken from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In these stories, the Palantir is an all seeing orb, which shows its users the future and is susceptible to demonic influences; Anduril is the name of the most powerful sword forged in Mordor which is wielded by the King of Gondor. Without relying too heavily on analogy and metaphor, it is clear that what we are seeing today is the combination of a massive surveillance dragnet paired with a deadly and powerful military force. Irony has once again shown us its theatrical death. Palantir has been tapped by Trump to create a database of every US citizen by having the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) use Palantir’s ‘Foundry’ technology to pool data in a massive database. The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp is part of the far-right and Trump connected Peter Thiel/Curtis Yarvin network which sees techno-militarism and a digital feudalism as the next step for the ‘defense of the supremacy of the West’. According to Karp’s argument in his new book, The Technological Republic:
Since the country’s tech scene is historically a product of the national security state, Silicon Valley executives and engineers should shed their compunctions about working with the military and dedicate themselves to ensuring another century of American hard-power supremacy.
All in all, as communists we should take these people at their word and recognize that a Luddite style rejection of technology is not in the cards, while an uncritical acceptance of the ideological divorce of tech and the ruling class is also irresponsible.
The new U.S. government spending bill, known colloquially as One Big Beautiful Bill highlights the government’s role in facilitating the growth of AI infrastructurally and financially. In this new spending bill, there are significant provisions given to the AI tech oligarchy. For example, any state who attempts to regulate the construction of data centers for environmental or other reasons, will not be eligible for certain government funds relating to broadband access. In an article on the topic, the following allotments for the military-industrial complex are laid out:
The bill provides $450 million to develop AI and autonomous robotics systems for naval shipbuilding. It allocates $145 million for AI in aerial and naval attack drones and systems. An additional $250 million is proposed to expand AI projects within U.S. Cyber Command, and $115 million is set aside to develop AI systems that help protect nuclear facilities from cyberattacks.
As I reported in my previous article on data centers, the environmental cost of these projects is devastating. According to the New York Times, one data center in NW northwest Indiana will add 2.2 gigawatts to their electrical load, and all the while, the project is destroying a natural wetland which is a habitat for native plants and birds. So while the analysis of data centers being an integral part of a ‘lumpen development’ strategy remains accurate, what's left is to examine how the AI market fuels the increasingly financialized and speculative core of the imperialist economies.
Chinese scholars Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin wrote an excellent article building on Lenin’s thesis on imperialism, titled Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism. In this article, Cheng and Lu map out the ways in which imperialism has grown and transformed since the time of Lenin. Two of these characteristics — the monopoly of finance capital and the monopoly of the US dollar and intellectual property — are striking in their importance to a political economic analysis of AI. Part of the crisis in the imperialist countries is that after the 1970s financial collapse, the solution was to offshore production and thus financialize industrial capital. This was resisted to a certain degree in European countries where the class struggle is at a qualitatively different level, but all in all, the major monopolies of the imperialist countries shifted production to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. What was left of the ‘parent company’ was a publicly traded stock market asset which makes money through speculating on ‘futures’ of commodities.
This ‘virtualization’ of the economy made way for the first wave of the tech boom in the 1990s where software was developed in the imperialist core, while hardware came from a slave class in the global peripheries. Now, in the next wave of the tech boom, the competition over production of hardware (microchips) has caused monopoly firms to funnel money into software (AI/LLMs) which can give the imperialists a military edge. Yet the same crisis remains, the microchips are being made in countries increasingly hostile to the imperialists while the development of the infrastructure for the software is what is being rapidly built in the imperial core (data centers). These data centers are nothing but financial instruments for the ruling class in the sense that they contribute nothing to the Real economy, the only jobs they create at any scale are during the period of construction, and as stated above they only serve to move money into different slush funds shared by tech oligarchs and the military-industrial complex.
The monopoly of the U.S. dollar in this context is what allows for such financial bubbles to form and burst with massive losses to the stock values of these monopoly firms — with no repercussions for the oligarchs and their lumpen strategy. When Chinese AI model DeepSeek R1 went public on January 27th, 2025, the AI financial bubble linking Silicon Valley and Wall Street burst. Chip-making company Nvidia lost $600 billion, while the 7 largest US tech firms involved in the AI boom lost $1 trillion. These numbers seem impossibly large, because they are; the financial bubble created by AI is only possible through government subsidies, deficit spending, and the primacy of the U.S. military. Together, these three factors are the scaffolding which upholds the U.S. dollar. As a matter of fact, up to 10% of the US economy–and the majority of manufacturing jobs still in the US–are oriented towards military hardware.
So, what is really happening in the Big Beautiful Bill? There is a shift occurring, but within the same general strategy. The military budget, which has grown year on year, is now prioritizing a new frontier -– the digital world. We should look at the proliferation of data centers and awarding of military contracts to tech firms as a military strategy. The targets of this strategy remain the same externally — Russia, China, Iran, and any other large center of accumulation autonomous and independent from the U.S. sphere of influence. Yet, when we look internally at the targets, we should see ourselves: critics of ICE, critics of Israel, critics of Trump, and critics of globalization’s excesses. If it was not evident before, it is evident now: these people do not care about us. We, as the working class, intellectuals, and artisans need to come together to oppose this grand strategy of militarization, surveillance, and economic deprivation for the many. We need to cohere around strategies to upset this lumpen development and prioritize a program of the working class, for the working class.
Hanna Eid is a Palestinian American writer, researcher, and a Union electrical worker. His writing concerns mainly imperialism and anti-imperialism in West Asia and West Africa.
Zohran Mamdani, the choice of Democratic Party voters in New York City, is anathema to the billionaire class. So much so that the New York Times elevated the work of a white supremacist in an effort…
“Neither disaster, catastrophe, nor calamity can take precedence … over the color-caste system.”
The UN Group of Experts on DRC reports the obvious, that Rwandan President Paul Kagame intends to annex DRC’s Kivu Provinces.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory rattled NYC’s political elite. But to win Black voters and defeat the Democrat machine, he must reject Al Sharpton’s co-optation and align with radical Black organizers.
America’s ruling class keeps inventing new boogeymen to disguise its endless war on workers, while wealth flows upward and capitalism’s collapse accelerates.
