Tech Won't Save Us - Silicon Valley is Courting Gulf Monarchies to Fund AI w/ Nitasha Tiku

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Nitasha Tiku to discuss how US tech companies are flocking to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to fund their expensive AI ambitions.Nitasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Read the pieces Nitasha contributed to on Silicon Valley getting funding from Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and its embrace of the US military.Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018. There’s still be no accountability.Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman met with many Silicon Valley CEOs months before Khashoggi’s murder.The United Arab Emirates launched its own AI strategy in 2018.The UAE also put Pegasus spyware on the phone of Khashoggi’s wife months before his murder.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was photographed signing a woman’s chest on June 4.Many Arab Americans in Silicon Valley have reported being scared to speak out in support of Palestinians for fear of retaliation.Support the show

those protests that we saw around Project Maven and during the Trump era, those were an aberration, you know, compared to the majority of the time. You don't get to be a giant multinational conglomerate by listening to a minority't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Natasha Tiku. Natasha is a tech culture reporter at The Washington Post who has been involved in a number of stories lately looking at Silicon Valley's relationship to the military, its turn back to the Middle East for funding. And I thought that these formed the foundation for a really important conversation to understand what is happening in Silicon Valley right now,

how things are shifting, and how it plays into this broader geopolitical moment that I think it's fair to say we've been talking about quite a bit on the show lately, because the United States is putting itself into conflict with China over broader geopolitical issues, but also over technological issues. And that is affecting a lot of things within the tech industry and also, you know, broader relationships that these companies have that are happening between countries. And obviously, when it comes to the Middle East, that is an important thing as well. Now, when I say the Middle East, I should be clear that obviously, we are still watching what's happening in Israel and in its bombing campaign, its genocide in Gaza. We don't talk

about that so much in this conversation, though it certainly comes up near the end. Our focus is more on how these figures in the tech industry are really returning to Saudi Arabia and to the United Arab Emirates in a very prominent way in order to get more funding for the projects that they want to carry out, particularly around AI and all of the investment that's not just going into developing these AI products, but building out data centers and trying to build chips and all of this sort of thing, which is obviously very expensive. So I was really happy to have Natasha on the show because she's someone whose work I've been following for a long time. And I wanted to understand what was actually going on here and how we should actually think about Silicon Valley making this turn back to the Saudis and the Emiratis, how that seems to stand in conflict with a

lot of this rhetoric that we often hear about, say, China or Russia being human rights abusers and how obviously the Saudi and Emirati monarchies are also human rights abusers. But in this case, it seems to be OK. You know what the tech companies are really looking to get out of these relationships, but also what the Saudis and Emiratis are looking to get out of it and what the United States itself is looking to get out of it. Because this is not just happening because the Saudis and Emiratis have a lot of money, but it plays into these broader geopolitical issues where the United States is trying to carve out allies, trying to make sure that people are on its side and adopting its technologies rather than Chinese technologies.

And Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are right in the middle of that whole discussion and are really benefiting from it because they're able to play both off one another and say, threaten the United States and say, oh, well, we'll adopt these Chinese things if you don't give us what we want. And as Natasha makes clear in this conversation, that's not to say that the United States doesn't have a lot of leverage. It absolutely does. But, you know, it gives these other countries, like the Saudis and Emiratis, some other forms of leverage that they can use to try to get the things that they want and to build up their own domestic industries and get access to these technologies. And then, of course, there's also the broader question of Silicon Valley's embrace of the U.S. military and the U.S. national security

state and how certainly these relationships have existed for a long time, but there really does seem to be a concerted effort within the tech industry to, you know, help the United States achieve its geopolitical goals, because obviously they seek to gain by doing that, or at least they hope that they will. So there are so many questions that are brought up by this larger shift, by everything that's driving it. And I dug into all of that with Natasha in this conversation that hopefully you're going to really enjoy because I found it quite insightful. And even after reading the pieces and doing the research for this episode, there were still things that I learned in speaking to Natasha about this. So if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform

of your choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, you can join supporters like Lauren from Massachusetts, Ben in Calgary, and Thomas in Eskilstuna, Sweden, by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Natasha, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me. Huge fan of the pod. Thanks so much. You know, I've been reading your work for a long time. You know, we occasionally send messages or at least tweet at one another, But it's great to finally have you on the show to dig into some of your work. And in particular, you co-wrote a recent piece in the Washington Post, digging into how Silicon Valley is really returning to the Middle East and to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular to seek funding for its various companies and projects and things like that.

So I wanted to dig into that. But before we talk about what's happening now, I was wondering if we could talk a bit about the history of Silicon Valley's relationship with the Middle East, because this certainly isn't the first time that a lot of Silicon Valley companies have looked to the vast kind of oil wealth of these countries to try to fund some of their companies. So what did we see about tech funding from Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the past, say in the 2010s, maybe? Right. So this began, I would say, around 2015. This is when MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of Saudi Arabia, issued this kind of vision about how the area could diversify away from oil. He never wanted to be trapped in commodity prices again.

And investing in tech was a big part of that. And they started with a direct investment in Uber, but quickly moved through... One of my co-writers, Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote as like the side door, they invested in the SoftBank Vision Fund. And just, it was a hundred billion dollar fund. It just threw the whole system out of whack. Like up until that point, you know, Silicon Valley, they were raising like for individual venture capital firms, they were raising up to a billion. But once you're trying to compete with a hundred billion dollars, right. And this is at close to when things are really getting heated, right. Like close to the apex of this 13 year

stretch of just up into the right, up into the right, everything is growing and going up. So that money, which primarily came from MBS and came from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, it was going into WeWork, Uber, it went into a chips company, AMD. They were shoving it into like dog walking startups. Like basically, if you seemed like you could dominate your category, you would be getting a call from the Vision Fund about, well, if you don't take our money, then we're going to invest in your competitor and then they will be the one that's able to dominate. So it just it was hugely influential in this like defining decade for tech. It's fascinating to hear how all of that money really just kind of threw things out of whack. Right. Because you have all this money entering, you have this $100 billion vision fund, partially funded by this kind of Gulf oil money

that is throwing things off. And naturally, of course, then a lot of these companies went to try to get some of that money, went to get their piece of it to fund their business models. But we also know that in 2018, Saudi Arabia killed Jamal Khashoggi, which really changed, it seemed like at least, the relationship that Silicon Valley had with Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Gulf more generally. Can you talk about what happened there and how that shifted things? Yeah, I was at Wired at the time and looking back at my effort to try to get comments from various companies that had public investment fund money

from Saudi Arabia or vision fund money. And most of them would not comment. So, you know, there were some, some vocal people who found it, you know, the connection with this authoritarian regime that had, you know, committed this atrocious murder, morally reprehensible, and wanted to draw a line in the sand and wanted to have a moment of reckoning about thinking, where is the tech industry getting its money from? Does this align with our values? But most of them already had the money and they just weren't willing to do more than say that they weren't going to attend Davos in the desert that year. You didn't really have an overwhelming feeling of it being taboo in some way. It was just sort of like, let's not highlight it, right?

You're not going to see anyone taking pictures with MBS the way that they did just earlier that year when he was kind of going on a tour of Silicon Valley. And, you know, you saw him with Tim Cook and Sergey Brin and Sundar and, you know, basically everybody. So it was, I guess, more put in the background. And then the Vision Fund itself was sort of falling out of grace. You saw what happened with WeWork. You know, many of its investments didn't quite pan out. As we wrote in the piece, it was perceived a little bit more as dumb money. So the two things, like the political pressure or the political scrutiny on where the source of the funding is coming from, and kind of the business savvy of the Vision Fund and of Saudi Arabia, they're both taking a nosedive at the same time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, especially to hear the response of some of these folks in tech,

where maybe it's not so much cutting off access to this money for an ethical reason, but a need to distance themselves from Saudi Arabia in particular and MBS because it would be like a public relations nightmare if they did keep up this relationship during that time. But would it be right to understand that there were still relationships ongoing, even during this kind of colder period in relations between the United States or Silicon Valley, particularly, and these kind of Gulf monarchies? And like those relationships were still happening. It was just kind of not publicly championed in the way that it would

have been in the past or that it increasingly is today. The Saudis stopped investing in the Vision Fund in 2020. So I think there was a lull. You know, there wasn't new money to allocate at the time. And Saudi Arabia still causes people to draw this line in the sand. I mean, currently, you know, you'll have companies say they think it's fine to raise money from authoritarian Gulf states, but, you know, not Saudi Arabia or not Qatar or, you know, they'll make distinctions between countries. But I don't think that there was, I mean, it was just really hard to get people to comment on what they thought about Saudi Arabia at the time. You kind of, you know, either one of your

portfolio companies had money from there, or you didn't know what would happen in the future geopolitically. It was definitely frowned upon, but you didn't see many people crusading against it, I guess. Yeah, that makes sense. And so if we are looking closer to what is happening now, what is driving the tech industry to head back to, say, the UAE and Saudi Arabia in this really concerted way to try to get access to the capital that these countries are ready to hand out through their funds? Yeah, I mean, I should say so around the same time, the UAE is moving in the same direction as Saudi Arabia did, except that they issued a plan that looked at like their future when it came to artificial intelligence in particular. Back in 2018, they laid out this plan to become a leader in the space

by 2031. So, you know, this is when many investors here are still talking about crypto or whatever was hot at the time, you know, it changes very quickly. And the UAE has this really prescripted idea of how they're going to build themselves into a name within this industry. And, you know, it doesn't involve just being the dumb money. It involves building up their own capabilities. You know, they started MBZ UAI. MBZ is, you know, the MBS of UAE and his brother. So that's Mohammed bin Zayed and his brother, Taghnoon bin Zayed is the national security leader. Actually, I made a map for the story trying to display visually all of the connections and it stretched very wide across my Excel sheet. But basically, he is the head of the chair of G42 and that is, oh, I guess we'll get into that part later. But sorry, going back to your initial

question was why are they coming back to these authoritarian Gulf states for money? I mean, I would say that it was driven in large part by the AI boom and the need for massive amounts of capital in order to get the chips that they need, in order to get the computing power that they need, the energy that they need and compete with others. And then you have that coinciding also with drying up of access to funds across the tech industry, you know, this two year kind of slowdown in tech stocks, challenges with getting LPs to give you money. And at the same time, and this part to me was really new and interesting, is you have the U.S. government in close contact or the Commerce Department in the White House, at least, in close contact with both officials in the Middle East, especially in the UAE, and tech CEOs, you know, Brad Smith from Microsoft, Sam Altman. Other folks are in the room. You know, it's always hard to tell, right? Like, what's the chicken and the egg? But it's many different interests aligning. So basically, the short way of saying it is that the U.S. would like for UAE and everyone in the Middle East to

choose the U.S. over China, right? And so much of the way we discuss AI policy and geopolitical policy is all around this lens of China and Russia being the enemy. So they are saying, yeah, maybe your deals with the UAE will help convince them to take Huawei technology out of their data centers. It will convince them to align with us. And in terms of the UAE, they have very close ties with China specifically on their AI efforts. So it was just a confluence of forces, but also forces with much, much higher stakes than the tech industry has historically had in geopolitics. That's really fascinating to hear. And there are a few points that I want to pick up on from that answer. So I'm going to put a pin in the geopolitical point for just a minute, and we'll come back to that one because that's a big topic to kind of dive into. I guess when you're talking about the funds drying up for these Silicon Valley companies, obviously within the Valley, that becomes more difficult. But I guess to some degree, that's also linked to the higher interest rates and how that has made it more difficult to access the cheap capital that these companies were

used to, which at a time when they're pushing this, this idea that AI is the future, and we need to make all these investments in AI requires all this capital. So that's a clear incentive to look for these other areas where people have a lot of money that they can try to draw from. And obviously, if we're talking about the Gulf monarchies, that is one of the places where there is a lot of capital that's ready to be lent. Yeah, exactly. I would add, though, that it's not the end of 0% interest rates. You can't overstate the importance of how that played a role in the growth of the tech sector. But venture capitalists were also having to write down investments, right? Like they just weren't seeing the kind of breakout successes, you know, that they had promised their investors as

they grew these funds larger and larger. You know, the economics of it just didn't work as well at a $5 billion fund some firms found as it did when they were a billion and below. And when you have such strong competition and you are investing at higher valuations, and it's challenging to go public, like what's your liquidity event? Who's going to buy your company? How are investors going to get the money back to the universities, the pension funds, the family offices that give money to venture capital firms? That makes perfect sense. No, I'm happy that you added that additional context for us. And when you talk about the UAE's AI strategy, basically coming out of 2018, can you expand on that a little bit? Like what the UAE is really trying to do in terms of turning itself into like a hub of artificial intelligence development or work, I guess? Yeah. So they had a multi-pronged plan, but basically they want to bring the technical talent into the country. Faisal al-Banai, who is in charge of, he's the secretary general of

the Advanced Technology Research Council, which is like, as I mentioned, it's kind of a complex to visualize, but he's very high up there. And he was a former head of Dark Matter as well, which we might get into. But he has this speech where he talked about it's not just a memo of understanding between the UAE and other foreign companies or individuals that they're doing partnerships with. They have their own AI agenda. They have AI projects that they want to work on within the country. And they're giving researchers like incredible visas and opportunities. They wine and dine them and bring them over. And, you know, they have just like incredible

access to resources to study, resources for compute. And, you know, they have their own agenda in terms of modernizing their technology, but also like growing their own AI companies. You know, their large language model Falcon from the UAE was at the top of the leaderboard for Hugging Face for a while last year. And they're continuing to build other large language models, you know, and do the same sort of thing that the US and other countries hope to do, which is like use AI in theory to make kind of every industry in theory more efficient, more productive, etc. So they had, you know, various ways of going about this. They're also building a satellite network, and like kind of unfathomably ambitious projects, which they can do because of the access to oil money that they have. Wow. I didn't realize that they were such like a player

in trying to move that forward. That's kind of new to me, but I guess it's not surprising when you see that these countries are really trying to move away from this dependence on oil and trying to reposition their economies in other ways. And I guess going back to that point that you made around Saudi money and UAE money previously, like in the last cycle, being seen as like dumb money that would just be invested in tech and didn't have a lot of strings attached to it. How have we seen that evolved in this era as these countries clearly have some other incentives backing their more recent investments in tech companies and in AI companies in particular? Yeah. I mean, you know, now like the negotiations, first of all, they're going to involve,

if you are an American company, having to talk to the commerce department, you know, concerns about export controls over semiconductor chips, like is the UAE's connection with China, you know, just a way to get past the export controls on NVIDIA chips? Is your deal as an American company with the UAE? So you have that. And then you also have, yeah, like really savvy negotiators who have a choice, right, between partnering with China and partnering with the US when they want to go forward on these massive projects like building out data centers for AI or building out a satellite network or space technology. That's another big ambition of theirs. So, you know, we know that for the partnerships with G42, like the one that Microsoft announced back in March or April, that one took

years or a year at least of negotiation with officials coming over from the UAE, the Secretary of Commerce going over there. It's just, yeah, it's like, it's the big leagues. It's the biggest leagues. It's really interesting to hear how those deals are being structured and also how, you know, there was one thing that was mentioned in the story that you worked on about Silicon Valley kind of going back to the Middle East where they were really saying that, okay, there was this company that got this investment from the UAE and it allowed them to set up, I think it was data centers in like Dallas and somewhere in California, but also build one in the UAE. It's like, they don't just want this work to be happening in Silicon Valley. They kind of want a piece of this and for some of it to start being done in the

Middle East itself. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That company was Cerebrus, which is, you know, they're building a semiconductor chip. So they're a great prism to look at this issue through because, you know, they are competing with NVIDIA. I don't know if you saw the image going around of Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA signing this woman's boobs today. Like, I was like, should I share it with my coworkers on Slack? Like, we're not going to write about this, but. Oh my God. Yeah. You know, I think lots of people are like, is this the top of the market? Yeah. So like not only the amount of capital that it takes to build something like new chips or data centers, but then you also have this intense competition, right? And this feeling like

whoever can control and harness AI, you know, whatever country, whatever company, whoever dominates now, this will set the tone for the next stage of technology. And, you know, it took Silicon Valley, like a lot of searching, like, what's the thing we want to put everything behind? You know, what will give us like that iPhone moment? And they definitely think that they found it in generative AI. So you can just imagine like the amount of pressure on Cerebrus, right, to make a name for itself as publicly traded companies are competing in this area. And the demand is so high for access to compute. Yeah. It also seems to put, you know, the UAE and Saudi Arabia in a really favorable position, right? Because if you have

the United States increasingly carving out this position where it sees itself on one side and China on the other, and it wants to get as many other countries into its camp as possible, and then it looks to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have, I think it's fair to say, traditionally been like US allies or countries that the United States has depended on and had a good relationship to and tried to keep that relationship together, then those two countries can kind of sit in the middle and say, okay, we can get a good deal from China. So the United States and Silicon Valley, you need to make this look attractive enough for us so that we can get what we want out of it as well, or else we're just going to go with these Chinese companies like Huawei or whatnot.

Right. And the U.S. does have like massive bargaining power also, right? Like people would prefer to work with NVIDIA chips rather than Huawei chips. So I would love to be in these rooms. And, you know, if anybody who's in the rooms wants to give me any intel, please reach out. But yeah, it's also the US saying,

look, you can't have it both ways. You have to decide. So G42, before this Microsoft deal happened, they were told, people use the expression with us, like rip out, rip out Chinese technology, like rip out Huawei technology in order to build these closer ties with the U.S., which is not what UAE overall said, but G42 is like their kind of premier tech firm in the Emirates. Interesting. And obviously, the kind of comparisons here can't be escaped. Obviously, we know that the competition between the United States and China is more geopolitical, right? But the United States and many other Western countries often try to frame it as, you know, bigger, more ethical, you know, concerns in terms of the questions around human rights abuses in China being one of the things that are frequently brought up. And then

it does, of course, cause you, I think, to question some of that sincerity and look at the real motivations when you see, you know, these companies in the United States seeking to foster these relationships with countries like Saudi Arabia in particular, where obviously we know that they dismembered a journalist, an American journalist. More than that, you know, he was, of course, Saudi as well, but Saudi American worked for The Washington Post. And it does show you that like, OK, human rights abuses matter, but like only in certain circumstances, right? Completely. And I think, you know, in talking to sources who are from the region or who closely follow it, they were just talking to me about like the cognitive dissonance of the West around like, you know, Russia is bad, China is bad, because the UAE, you knowE has played a role in the Tigray genocide. It's played a role in the Yemen civil war. And from what my sources said, it's just pure racism that you can consider

Russia evil because of the deaths in Ukraine, but you can blame the media as well, right? You're not seeing the Tigray genocide and the Yemen civil war as prominently in your newsfeed. And so maybe you don't even know, but that's one of the consequences of looking at things through the prism of like China is the enemy. And, you know, when it comes to AI, like they have been ahead of us militaristically and China's increased militarism is also why you see people in the US trying to move faster and shifting the way that they see the world. But yeah, it just gives you this really stark view on this calculus, right? And how I wonder if the sometimes ahistorical or narrow way that Silicon Valley can think about the world or geopolitics, or even the way Americans

think about it really prepares us for this really complicated moment. That's a really good point. And, you know, especially to bring up those examples around the UAE and what it's been up to, because of course, I think it's fair to say that in North America, in Canada, or the US where you are, we tend to look at what's happening in the Middle East. You know, of course, we see what Israel is doing right now. We know that Saudi Arabia is like the big bad player, but usually we look at Dubai and it's like, okay, we know that they don't have a democracy. We know that there are these issues there, but it doesn't seem as bad yet. They are still involved in, you know, these really serious,

you know, actions that should be very concerning. And even when it comes to Khashoggi, like was mentioned in the piece that you worked on, UAE technology was involved in kind of spying on Khashoggi's wife's phone, which was instrumental in the Saudis essentially getting him, right? Yeah, it was, you know, it was the Israeli built Pegasus spyware used by the UAE on his wife's phone. But the idea of cyber warfare and surveillance, that's something that is kind of another massive rock to turn over when it comes to the UAE and the role that they've played. They had hired a number of former NSA NSA officials to work on spyware that ended up being used on journalists and dissidents. And it's shocking how little that comes up in these discussions. Like when I was reporting on this piece, if not for my sources continuing to emphasize these issues to me, you know,

if you look at like, say, Representative Gallagher's letter to the Secretary of Commerce about G42 and about these ties, it was purely about the connections to China, like, you know, really not that much about their own use of surveillance. And as one of my sources pointed out, like, you know, the UK Parliament has even shown that the UAE has given money to the Wagner Group in Russia. So it was one of the most fascinating stories, I guess, to report. There's nothing quite like the smell of fresh baked bread coming out of the oven. What if I told you that you could get the delicious experience of homemade bread with none of the time and work involved? Well, you can from Wildgrain.

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looking to get out of it. So with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, when they're engaging in these deals with Silicon Valley companies and with the United States more broadly to get access to these technologies, to invest in these tech companies and not to be excluded from doing that in the way that, say, the United States is trying to do with Chinese capital or Russian capital or things like that. We've talked about how they're trying to move their economies away from this dependence on oil and to have more diversified economies. But what specifically are they trying to do here? Are they trying to build up their tech economies? Are they trying to increase their government's legitimacy in the West? Is it a mix of different factors? How would you kind of sum it up? Yeah, I would say it's a mix of different factors. And, you know, it's sort of

like putting together a closer sense of their strategy, you know, based on their actions and some of these public documents for when they laid out their plans. You know, Saudi Arabia, for example, when it was looking at diversifying its economy and increasing its cultural capital, they didn't just look at Silicon Valley. They also have made, for example, major inroads in golf. I don't follow it. I just started looking into this as a function of the story, but very similar thing. They came in with a lot of money and built this alternative to the PGA in the US and apparently offered Tiger Woods insane sums of money that he said no to, but other golfers didn't. So I think it's, yeah, a multifold approach, right? They want the same reason that

tech companies and sports companies are in business, right? They want that revenue, but also like the cultural capital that comes from being at this frontier technology avant-garde, you know, the rich and powerful people of the planet right now are in tech. And also I think to strengthen their own economy, diversify their own economy. And, you know, they're savvy players. They think about AI, at least in the same way that we do, that it could boost productivity and GDP, like across sectors, right? You can apply it to agriculture or I'm sure like oil extraction or what have you, you know, but they are trying to, you know, anticipate for peak oil, which is expected to come this decade.

Yeah, definitely. And with Saudi Arabia, I guess that attempt to bring in tech is part of this broader push as well, where we've seen them investing in video game companies and, you know, in getting kind of soccer players and other sports players to come to Saudi Arabia. And they've traditionally been a very closed country, but are opening up a bit more, it seems, and trying to kind of soccer players and other sports players to come to Saudi Arabia. And they've traditionally been a very closed country, but are opening up a bit more, it seems, and trying to offer more tourism to bring more people in. I was even invited earlier this year to speak at a conference in Saudi Arabia. I was like, no, thank you. I thought it was like weird to get the invite. Who invited you?

I can't remember who it was now, but it was for like a digital wellness conference. And I was like, why is there a digital wellness conference happening in Saudi Arabia? Oh my gosh. You have to go back through your emails and find it. I'm so curious. I'm going to have to do that. That's really interesting. But yeah, like, so I guess you can see them trying to build up this legitimacy, be seen in a different way, but also, of course, diversify their economies and whatnot away from this oil dependence. And I guess when we look at the United States, you know, obviously, they have long had relationships with these oil rich companies in the Gulf, previously more kind of colonial imperialist relationships, especially when they were overthrowing governments and

things, you know, way back in the mid 1900s and whatnot. But now that looks quite a bit different. And as these countries are very importantE and Saudi Arabia, that this could backfire or that they could give these countries, which obviously have these very authoritarian governments, you know, technologies and, you know, this kind of technological ammunition that they might need to do some pretty horrible things? Yes, certainly. You know, one of the, so with the Middle East story, I worked with Ellen Nakashima, who writes about national security, Kat Zekruski, who writes about tech policy and Liza, who I mentioned earlier. And, you know, we asked everyone these questions because it is surprising to understand that, like, oh, these tech deals have been gone over in detail through the Department of Commerce. And you do see more Commerce Department officials talk about these deals rather than NATSEC. And I think it'll be really interesting to see how divisions within the U.S. who weigh the risks

differently, how that will play out. We saw a great New York Times report about looking into G42 and you had AI companies saying like, no, we talked to DC about this. And yet you have like national security agencies, you know, wondering whether they need to like sanction it or block it in some way from working with American companies. So one of the quotes from our story was trust, but verify, you know, so they, they say that they have plans to continue looking into this and that promises were extracted after detailed negotiations. But yeah, obviously there's, there's no, there's no guarantees. I mean, you know, before Khashoggi's murder, MBS was really seen as this reformer figure. And as I mentioned, he was like photographed with all of these leading venture capitalists and tech CEOs.

And you could see if you look at the press from the time, how much this cultural capital also impacted him. Like imagine if, you know, it had never happened and he still had that same reputation and you can secure the deal with OpenAI and Microsoft as opposed to UAE. Like, you know, these are really valuable kind of narratives that they're spinning. Yeah, you can definitely see that. And, you know, on that point, when you think about what these countries and these governments are doing, as we've been talking about, the goal of the United States is really to keep them from doing these deals and having these relationships with

Chinese companies and with China more broadly. But in the story, you mentioned that the United Arab Emirates AI minister was saying that it can't go all in on one superpower previously. Is it clear how much they are really pulling away from China? Like, are they really cutting ties or are they just kind of reducing things for now? What do we see there? I think we probably won't have a very clear sense of it until some of these projects come to fruition. But you were right to note that comment from the AI ambassador. I'm forgetting his title, but he told my colleague Kat Zuckerski that when she was in Davos. And yet when G42 was talking to us, they said they had decided

they were aligned with the US. So I was looking through some of the recent deals with the UAE, and they're still working with China on their satellite network that I mentioned they're building. And it might really come down to some technical specifications as well, right? Like, what are the protections in the data center? How are things structured in such a way? You definitely hear a lot more people talking about ways that this can be done safely, but I would say it's still a big unknown. Yeah. And I'm sure it will be for quite a while yet as we start to see how these things play out and even how this wider division between the United States and China evolves, right? I'm sure that that will shape this too. But if we move our focus back to Silicon Valley, what does it say about these

Silicon Valley figures that they were so quick to run back to Saudi Arabia or the UAE, knowing the human rights implications there, like the blood that some of this money is soaked in, that if there's money there, they're going to go after this money is soaked in, you know, that if there's money there, they're going to go after it. And it doesn't really matter, or it doesn't seem to matter that these questions are there about, you know, the governments who they're getting the money from. Yeah, I would say when you put these questions to tech CEOs and investors, in the past couple years, and in the past year, especially, you hear a very nationalistic argument, like they are an American company, they will work with American allies. Like if DC had told them not to do this, they wouldn't be doing it. And,

you know, they're getting approval for all of the deals that there are. And you will also hear, you know, hand in hand with like, they're an American company, and they're doing this for America with concerns about China. So it's really, I can't like stress enough how much it is viewed through that prism. Like we are in the fight of our lives to dominate AI and everything must be approached through that lens. That's a really important point because it also plays into this bigger question that I wanted to discuss with you, too, you know, based on some other reporting that you've been doing over the past few months where we have really seen this, I think, notable shift over the past few years in Silicon Valley, where, you know, we previously kind of had this narrative that the tech industry was kind of oppositional to government or, you know, kind of had this, you know, this difficult relationship to it because of these older ideas that were around at, say, the turn of the internet age and

whatnot. And now we do really see these tech companies and these tech CEOs very firmly saying that they are working with the American government, they are working with the American military, there's a lot of investment being made in defense technologies, and they are basically there to support this basically conflict with China and to support the United States in doing that. What does that tell us about this shift that has happened in Silicon Valley over the past few years? Yeah, I would say this is like a massive ideological shift. You know, I always think about when Mark Zuckerberg went to that White House dinner, and it was reported that

he offered to let Xi Jinping give his child a Chinese name. The way that tech companies talked about China in the 2010s compared to the view now is just night and day. In the 2010s, it was like the hope that they could still get into the Chinese consumer market. You know, if you are searching for growth, like you cannot ignore the Chinese market. And that's why compromises were made for Google's search engine initially. And then when they went back with Project Dragonfly, and the idea of getting into China now is just not something you hear about, but it was like the goal for large scale, massive, multinational American tech companies. They were talking about the next billion. And obviously there is a lot of emphasis on Indian consumers as well, or at least there's a lot of adoption there, but China was the goal. So that has completely shifted. Right. And,

you know, during that time, I don't think that like, it was very rare to hear companies talking about themselves even as American companies, right? It was like, we're a democratizing force. You know, it was a lot of like, I guess, more framing themselves as bringing democratic values, more like freedom, transparency. If you think back to like the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Arab Spring and the way that the executives parlayed that into a lot of goodwill and benevolence kind of surrounding them, right? But they weren't talking about themselves as American companies. And now this is a shift we're seeing across the country, right? Like it's not just among tech executives, but to me that is unlike how much did they pull away from Saudi Arabia or from authoritarian regimes? You don't hear people like up on a soapbox about that. But being American companies is now something that comes with its own cultural cachet and is part of this larger political shift that we've seen in terms of the loudest voices in tech. That's so fascinating, right? Because even from an international perspective, it makes you think like, so how does that then change the perception of these companies like from other countries if they're not even framing themselves so much

as like, you know, these internationalist companies, these companies who have these like particular democratic values or whatnot that they're just pushing out there, but now they're explicitly saying that we are American companies. We're here to support, you know, the United States and its kind of geopolitical goals or whatever. You have to imagine that that then results even from potential like U.S. allies, a further changing of how they view these companies and what they're doing then,

I guess. Yeah. I don't think it would have served them well to emphasize that they were American companies in the 2010s at all. So, you know, it worked out in their favor. And now you do hear less about like democratizing force or like that kind of rhetoric. But you do hear that they consider themselves American companies. I mean, sometimes that fact is brought up at the most convenient times, but that is how they reconcile, you know, raising money from authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. Like those are our allies. So we're operating no differently than the U.S. government. Exactly. Like if the U.S. government decided, you know, the UAE and Saudis were not okay

countries anymore, we would back off because, you know, we're aligned with them now, you know, very clearly and very openly. So I guess I was also wondering, when we're talking about, you know, this kind of patriotic turn or nationalistic turn in the tech industry, and this desire to openly embrace the geopolitical goals of the United States and of the US military, there has to be more than just kind of a patriotic angle to this, right? There has to be an economic angle. Are we just seeing a lot more funding for defense tech companies or a lot more funding from the US government for this type of stuff? What are we seeing in the actual economic side of it that will be driving the shift as well? Yeah, just like the confluence of forces we saw

in the Middle East, there's also a lot to untangle here as well. You have the slowdown in the tech sector overall, not if you're at the top of the stock market, right? But not if you're in AI, but for everybody else. You have the challenge of raising capital if you are a venture firm, or if you are an ambitious tech company that had a really high valuation. You also have the U.S. Department of Defense making these massive industrial policy changes, you know, where they are also trying to make themselves more hospitable to startups under pressure from venture capital investors who have been lobbying very heavily for this. But, you know, it's after the success of Palantir and Anduril to kind of take on the defense primes, it started to be seen as like, oh, okay, like maybe it's not just,

you know, these tiny little contracts, I don't know, 1,000th of Boeing, right? Like maybe you can really go for getting a bigger chunk of the defense budget. And you have the U.S. government trying to find ways to smooth out the process for tech startups. You have them also giving guarantees to investors that are backing some of this technology that they think will be important for national security. And also, I would say at the same time, you had this kind of, I don't know, like identity crisis in a way. I think like Silicon Valley was wondering like around with the war in Ukraine and China's increased militarism, all of these global tensions that you saw with the supply chain issues during COVID. It just made, I think, the tech industry wonder about its place in the world. And also venture capitalists who really have to be able to persuade young people that this is the industry that they should go into and I am the source of funding that you should take, right? So I think like this shift to nationalism and looking at working in defense as this higher calling, right? To like keep your country safe, to

fight for Western values, to build more ambitious tech. This is not like a SaaS player. This isn't going to be derided like the way that Juicero or, you know, some of the Uber for X or, I don't know, WeWork for Y companies were in the 2010s. It just gave everybody an opportunity to kind of slough off that like negativity and in the narrative shift to techno optimism and techno solutionism, right? Like we have national security concerns. We have the youngest, smartest, most ambitious people they can build for that. It just, it kind of like all aligned in this way. I was wondering what VCs were going to do. And now like, I'm like, oh, it, you know, really it worked out. Yeah. Unfortunately, obviously there there's always a lot of money going into weapons and war and things like that. But then to see the tech industry be so embracing of it as well just makes you feel, I think, a bit worried for where in the industry, including, you know, these regular workers at these tech companies believe that helping the U S government is the right thing to do. But then there are also these events like we saw with the Google workers recently demonstrating against its contracts with Israel who are opposed to these sorts of things

and seem to be questioning these relationships that these tech companies have with governments in the Middle East, whether it's Saudi Arabia, the UAE, but also Israel as well. What are we seeing in that divide between the rank and file in this company? And is it clear where the majority opinion stands? Are these protesters more of the minority in the companies, or do they have a larger voice than we were during the protests against Google's contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven, which was using computer vision with drones. And I think people really forget that Google went back into the fray not long after those protests. I think it was really interesting to see how many of the tech accelerationists, for example, and I know you've talked about it on the pod, but just for a short

definition, people who want to see technology progress quickly, unburdened, without policy hindrance or dissent from tech workers. There's a massive amount of negativity around just tech workers speaking out, period, right? I think a lot of the pushback that you saw around basically the slacktivism during the pandemic and during the George Floyd era really angered a lot of tech CEOs. And they have this extremely negative, the way that they talk about engineers or about who is hired at Google. Should Facebook cut 50% of its staff? Why can't you just pull an Elon and fire everyone? I think it's really shaped how safe tech workers feel in speaking out. And I think also the layoffs have made their job security a lot

more precarious. So it's always been hard to gauge what the mood of a massive company with 80,000 employees is, right? But the appetite for dissent or the willingness to hear dissent has been largely shut down, like at the top of tech companies on tech platforms. I mean, you know, if you look, I guess I'm talking about like the tenor of discussion on Twitter or on X, you know, we're just like, you will hear folks say like, thank goodness we don't have to censor ourselves anymore, the folks in power. So, I mean, I think, again, this is also what you're seeing country wide, right? Like who are the people who are losing their jobs because of their stance on the war in Gaza? It's not, you know, certain people can speak freely and

certain people, certain views are unwelcome at the moment. Yeah, definitely. And we've certainly seen reporting as well on people in the tech industry who feel like they can't speak out in support of Palestinians because they would, you know, they feel that they would be retaliated against or they have been retaliated against by their employers. And, you know, obviously we've been talking about the Middle East and the tech industry's relationship with the Middle East in relation to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. But would it be fair to say that despite everything that has been going on in Israel over the past eight months, that that really hasn't changed Silicon Valley's relationship with the Israeli tech industry or the Israeli government as well?

Or have we seen shifts there? I haven't noticed any shift, but I also haven't reported on this topic in particular. Those protests that we saw around Project Maven and during the Trump era, those were an aberration, you know, compared to the majority of the time, you don't get to be a giant multinational conglomerate by listening to a minority of your workforce, right? So there was this period of time when the, you know, US politics were shifting, we're going from Obama to Trump. And these companies are going from, they're shifting out of their own narrative of like their relationship with their workers, how candid they can be, and searching for growth and

needing to compete in the cloud and other like highly lucrative spaces. Like you have government clients or you have enterprise clients who just want you to do the job. So yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating and I wish that everyone could speak more candidly. I would be really curious to hear, you know, what's going on more inside tech companies. But I also think the voices that we're not hearing from also happen to be the more marginalized voices. I appreciate you outlining that for us. And I think it's really important to understand that stance

and what is going on within these companies, the divisions that exist within them and in the broader tech industry and how this increasingly reflects questions that are happening in American society. And just to close off our conversation, I wanted to ask kind of broadly your reflections on this entire conversation. You know, we've been talking about how Silicon Valley is now courting these authoritarian

monarchies that have a lot of oil money in the Middle East, how they haven't turned away from Israel despite, you know, the intense bombing and death in Gaza over the past eight months or so. And then, of course, what we're just seeing with the tech industry more generally, where it's basically saying that we are here to serve the American government and the American military and its geopolitical objectives, because that aligns with what we see our interests as being. So I wonder what that tells you more broadly about what's happening in Silicon Valley right now, the politics, I guess, of the tech industry and the people who lead that industry. And I guess if you have any thoughts on where you

see this going into the future, now that you have the tech industry really embracing this particular vision of what it is and what it's going to be moving forward? Those are really great questions. Let me think for a second. You know what I was thinking just earlier today, I was looking up like, when was it that Andreessen Horowitz invested in Yuga Labs, you know, the board ape NFT company, like at a $5 billion valuation. And it was March, 2022. So I would also say that like, it does show us that these are businesses. It is the most vibrant sector of the economy for a reason. So as long as like the financial winds are blowing in the same direction, I think that we will probably see more embrace of working for the defense sector. As long as generative AI and AI more generally

is seen as this transformative economy appending technology, we will see more deals with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. But the tech industry also follows where the growth is. So some of the same folks were also talking to us about crypto just as passionately a couple of years ago. It's hard to say. I think we've seen though that there has been a major political shift in the loudest voices, I would say. It's always been a real challenge to color Silicon Valley, right, with like one brush. Part of what was so illuminating about the protests in the 2010s and worker revolt was seeing this differentiation between management and workers, which you previously had not seen because, you know, because in part,

because of the way that they talked about the media as, you know, be candid with us, we will have frank conversations, we the CEOs of Google or the co founders of Google, we will tell you what's what. And, you know, we will do our best to not be evil. And, you know, we have planet scale technology and very real concerns. So just like keep it in house and we'll work it out. And those like stratifications were exploded when workers started talking more. Right. And I think right now the loudest voices for sure are folks like, you know, the all in podcast, many of the investors who backed Elon Musk, who see his ownership of X as a turning point in terms of who can set the agenda for what's talked about.

But that's also the folks who have time to talk on social media, right? So it's just going to be a very illuminating next phase to see whether this is something that they settle into. There's also the chance that the financial upside that tech investors are hoping to see from the defense department won't be able to come to fruition in the same way. It won't work with venture structures, which have these five to 10- year horizons. You know, they depend on like one or two breakout stars from a fund. Does that match with the government procurement strategy? Maybe not. So we know that some of these investors still, you know, spoke a certain way about the government for years. So it's a very tumultuous time. And I'm just watching as closely as I can to try to understand those stratifications

and where we might be going next. Yeah, as are we all. And I think that gives us some things to watch for, right? Like how venture capital is approaching these things, how the people at the top of Silicon Valley are looking at it. And, you know, whether the U.S. government strategy changes or shifts in the years to come and what impact that might have on the tech industry and its orientation toward this broader question. And of course, we'll be watching your work as we do that, as I'm sure you're going

to keep following it and reporting on it. Natasha, it was really fantastic to speak with you. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Great to talk to you too, Paris. Natasha Tiku is a tech culture reporter at the Washington Post. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Ballou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening. Make sure to come back next week. Thank you.