AI, the New “Nuclear Weapon”
The internet bubble is often used as an analogy for an AI bubble, as if AI will follow the same script: valuation mania, frantic cash burn, then a return to value. In my view, people are missing an important fact: AI is not the internet. AI has extremely high military strategic value!
Internet companies have to answer: how much money can a website or an app make? Can user growth turn into revenue? Can revenue turn into profit? Once profit expectations worsen, the whole valuation logic collapses at once.
AI’s main payers are tech giants and sovereign states. For them, especially for sovereign states, when AI will make money is secondary. What matters is “not losing”! The last technology with this quality was the nuclear bomb — nobody ever questioned the cost of developing it.
Nuclear weapons are the best reference point. No country decided to build nuclear weapons because nuclear power plants were profitable, and no great power has scrapped a nuclear program just because it was “not profitable in the short term.” There is only one reason: without it, you have no seat at the negotiating table.
AI is following the same path. For a country and for a giant company, the question has changed from “how much money can AI applications make?” to “how much more can I invest, and what happens if I invest too slowly?” The constraint has changed, and so has the investment logic: investment is no longer limited by profit, but by how long fiscal resources, cash, energy, and willpower can hold out.
A New “Nuclear” Supply Chain
From GPUs to models, every link in this chain is as hard to replicate and as easy to control as the nuclear industry:
Advanced chips and compute are enriched uranium and centrifuges: capacity is limited, and they can be embargoed. Energy is the base that keeps the whole system running: without electricity, even the strongest model is just a blueprint. Data and top talent are the team of scientists: you cannot simply poach them, and you cannot afford to wait for them. The frontier model itself is the warhead.
Chip embargoes are, in effect, the AI version of nuclear non-proliferation. Compute quotas and model export controls are the new arms-control negotiations. Whoever masters the full stack gets a ticket in.
An AI Version of the “P5”
Today’s P5 are nuclear-armed because they alone invested early enough, assembled the full capability for nuclear weapons, and took their place at the right moment. After nuclear technology spread, very few countries have actually built a complete nuclear deterrent system. The world can be simply divided into the nuclear haves and have-nots: either holding the knife or lying on the chopping board.
AI is the same. In the future, only a handful of players who simultaneously possess chips, energy, data, talent, and frontier models will truly have a seat at the table.
Everyone else is not unable to use AI, but can only rent someone else’s intelligence, accepting someone else’s rules, prices, and cutoff risks. Falling a generation behind costs more than a bit of commercial profit: it costs bargaining power itself. With leading intelligence, you do not need to ask how much money it can make. Intelligence itself is deterrence; it is hegemony.
AI for Science has advanced rapidly recently. Groups that master leading AI may extend their lead further into other fields: drug discovery, basic research, advanced manufacturing, and more…
The strategic value of AI keeps growing.
Conclusion
AI’s strategic value has already been proven in real combat.
In the 2026 US-Israeli operations against Iran, “Epic Fury” and “Roaring Lion,” AI played an important role. The US military’s number-one military adviser is Claude. In intelligence analysis alone, AI has achieved astonishing results, analyzing petabytes of call audio and documents in one go. AI is fluent in Persian, Arabic, Russian, and other key languages, and has a comprehensive understanding of military affairs. From screening and locating strike targets to formulating strike plans, it assists military decision-making at every step, compressing months of work by intelligence officers into hours.
By the end of 2026, compared with when the US-Iran war broke out, AI is still breaking through. Besides the tech giants racing on technology, the most nervous parties now are probably the intelligence and security agencies of the great powers.
AI is not only about profit. It is about survival.