By Sara Flounders
October 23, 2026
War is the most profitable product U.S. capitalism produces. The profits are guaranteed.
This simple truth explains every escalation in Washington’s new cold war against China. Follow the money. The Pentagon budget — surpassing the $839 billion allocation for 2026, to over $1 trillion now and $1.5 trillion in 2027 — is not simply a military allocation. It is a guaranteed profit stream for private corporations, a conveyor belt of contracts, cost-plus reimbursements and revolving-door payoffs flowing to the same handful of companies decade after decade. (tinyurl.com/ycx5hrf5)
Philippine people protest Pax Silica, Manila, Aug. 13, 2026.
War doesn’t have to break out to generate billions of dollars. The mere preparation for war — the new base, the new missile system, the new “defensive” alliance — each is a contract. Peace is bad for business. Permanent tension, permanent threats, permanent “existential danger” is the ideal business climate for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing — and now, decisively, for the AI giants of Silicon Valley.
Pax Silica is the newest scheme for converting cold war hysteria into corporate revenue.
A bloc built on exclusion
Project Pax Silica, launched at a Washington summit on Dec. 12, 2025, is the State Department’s bid to assemble a technological coalition against China across critical minerals, semiconductors and AI supply chains. Its membership roster — Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, England, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Australia — mirrors the containment coalitions of earlier imperialist eras.
Despite its Latin branding — “Pax” for peace, “Silica” for the world of computer chips — Pax Silica is the economic architecture of a new Cold War. A State Department draft letter warns countries they cannot participate in both the United States’ AI coalition and China’s rival framework. (tinyurl.com/5c5bvzj7)
Every country under U.S. domination will be forced to distort its economy and spend its resources in this desperate effort to project U.S. dominance and halt China’s development.
The Philippines becomes a sacrifice zone
Nowhere is this clearer than the Philippines, designated a frontline data center and military outpost in Pax Silica’s Economic Security Zone. Manila is expected to pay the heaviest price — its land, water and energy absorbed by facilities whose outputs benefit Silicon Valley shareholders.
People living in the Philippines will carry the economic and environmental costs but not the profits. There is an international campaign to expose this imperialist scheme that is gaining momentum. (ILPS-Pax Silica)
Big 6 wage fuel war against Iran
Nowhere is this war-making logic more visible than in the Pentagon’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) to plan attacks on Iran. NBC News reported that the U.S. military is using AI to help plan air attacks on Iranian targets. The Big 6 AI corporations — Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Anthropic — are supplying the cloud infrastructure and compute capacity powering these operations. (nbcnews.com, March 11)
This is not just theoretical. When the U.S. bombs, first AI does the targeting, the trajectory calculations and the damage assessment. More than 10,000 Iranian targets were hit in the opening days of the U.S. attack. Iran retaliated by declaring U.S. and Israeli banking interests and Gulf states’ data centers as legitimate targets. “As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” Iran’s Tasmin News agency declared earlier this year. (Wired, March 11)
Who owns these data centers? American tech giants. The Big 6 are building massive facilities in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — frontline assets in the new cold war. They are no longer abstract “cloud” nodes. They are sitting ducks in a conflict zone. War has moved from the battlefield to the server farm.
Israel’s prominent role in Pax Silica reveals the alliance’s logic. Tel Aviv gains secure entry into AI command centers — a calculated hedge to insulate its colonial project within U.S.-protected transnational infrastructure.
The landlord model of empire
Malaysian technology and geopolitical analyst John Pang has characterized the U.S. approach as a “landlord model” — countries of the Global Majority provide the land, energy, minerals, data centers and capital, while U.S. corporations retain control of the artificial intelligence itself and charge rent for access.
Intelligence becomes another privately controlled utility, metered to countries actively discouraged from developing independent technological capacity. Researchers compare these foreign-controlled data centers to military bases: the physical infrastructure sits inside a country, but the knowledge, control and profits remain concentrated abroad.
AI ‘goes rogue’?
Under a national security memorandum signed by President Donald Trump on Aug. 12, 2026, select U.S. companies are authorized to work with the Justice and Homeland Security departments to hack “foreign groups” — operations that could lead to “disruption, manipulation or destruction of information systems and networks, including virtual and physical infrastructure.” (NBC News, Aug. 15)
Though this has been established practice for years, now the U.S. openly authorizes non-state actors to carry out intrusions, data theft and sabotage against countries around the world. Corporate AI wars behind the scenes blur with state warfare abroad.
In the corporate AI wars raging behind the scenes, are the U.S.-based AI companies attacking rival models to kill competition? This is how every institution in a capitalist economy functions.
Is this what was behind the widely publicized “rogue attacks” or hacks on “open source,” “open weight” Hugging Face, a U.S. platform, by hundreds of bots from privately owned U.S. AI companies in August?
Have AI bots “gone rogue,” as the media reports, or are they being programmed to destroy competition?
Hugging Face was quickly bought by Nvidia, supposedly to save it from other competing bot attacks. Nvidia is the largest AI-focused company in the world, valued at $5.24 trillion. It functions as a central financier and investor across the AI supply chain. Nvidia chips and open-source software are heavily integrated into U.S. military radar systems, drone processing, satellite imagery analysis and high-performance computing through defense contractors. (aljazeera.com/news, Sept. 17)
The AI pyramid scheme
Washington’s entanglement with the Big 6 operates at three mutually reinforcing levels: policy, finance and narrative. Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington have formed a closed loop of reciprocal investments. Tech giants pour equity and cloud credits into AI startups, which in turn spend that money on cloud computing and GPU capacity from those same giants. Reported revenues and valuations inflate — yet there is little real-world productivity.
As analyst Brian Berletic has described, U.S. tech billionaires want this AI pyramid scheme to “think” the U.S. out of terminal decline — to preserve U.S. primacy worldwide and billionaire control at home. (tinyurl.com/2f2tafxk)
Repression comes home
An essential part of trying to control the world is controlling U.S. workers here at home. The same corporations scanning foreign networks under cyber privateering licenses already monitor U.S. workers and activists. These tools don’t stop at borders.
Every escalation of the “national security” state tightens domestic surveillance — targeting union organizers, antiwar activists and anyone resisting imperial war plans. Cutting U.S. workers off from information provided by resisters here and globally isn’t incidental — it’s the point. The ruling class assumes that a population surveilled and isolated can’t challenge the war machine that its taxes fund. Pax Silica’s digital fortress has two walls: one facing outward, one facing us.
China’s alternative
Against this stands China’s open-weight approach. Models like DeepSeek and GLM can be downloaded, locally hosted, modified and adapted to national and social needs — giving countries what the landlord model is specifically designed to deny them: the ability to possess and develop technology on their own terms.
Chinese AI scientist Yi Zeng argues that AI “is a human society and an ecological world.” Artificial intelligence may assist that society but should not be permitted to drive it. Technology is consciously directed toward human and ecological needs — versus the imperatives of private accumulation. (tinyurl.com/ycyywuma)
Whose security?
The U.S. military budget remains the constant in every equation: a river of profit flowing to private corporations, whether bombs fall or not. War under capitalism is not an aberration to be corrected, but a business model to be fed. Pax Silica simply extends the model from missiles to megabytes — from chokepoint to cloud.
The question is not whether Washington’s digital fortress can hold. It is whether the world’s people — the ones providing the land, energy and labor — will continue paying rent to an empire that designs a landlord’s peace.
They will not. The Global Majority is increasingly choosing ownership over tenancy. And no arms budget, however obscene, can purchase its way out of that future.
