Elon Musk’s Starlink is increasingly facing competition from China’s SpaceSail. Meanwhile, Trump’s new “energy Tsar” has said that Washington is doomed to lose the “AI arms race” without fossil fuels. Energy production does seem to be a priority for the new administration: one may recall that in his famous interview with news-host Sean Hannity, Donald Trump said he wanted to “drill, drill, drill!”. What do these pieces of news have to do with Trump’s hunger for minerals in Ukraine and even elsewhere, considering his plans for Greenland and so on?

Well, to make sense of so many measures and plans carried out by Trump, one needs to keep in mind 1) how much the business interests of Big Tech oligarchs align with Washington interests—not just Trump’s; 2) the fact there there is an AI race going on; and 3) the extent to which AI and similar industries heavily rely on energy and minerals.

The truth is that Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla, as well as his other enterprises, are increasingly a driving force for US soft power. In fact the very distinction between “soft” and “hard” power might get blurry sometimes, as Musk himself is on the record boasting of his (or the US) alleged capacity to conduct coup d’etats. He once tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” (note how Musk said “we”, in an ambiguous enough manner).

Interestingly, the context of this provocative remark, in 2020, was a response to an allegation that Washington and Musk’s Tesla business interests were plotting a coup against Bolivian leader Evo Morales, to “get lithium” there—lithium being of course a key mineral for capacitors for electronics, smartphones, computers and the like.

In a way, Elon Musk’s web of enterprises are the very face of a sector of the so-called “deep state”, which goes to suggest that Trump’s war “against the deep state” is more accurately a war against a faction of it. Former diplomat and academic Peter Dale Scott has defined the American “deep state” as precisely an informal government which comprises “bureaucrats, technocrats and plutocrats”, as well as “a galaxy of contractors, profiteers, and others in the nominal private sector.”

Already in 2023, Ronan Farrow, a reporter writing for The New Yorker, described Musk’s “shadow rule”. Patrick Tucker, science and technology editor for Defense One, argued, back in 2022, that the Pentagon’s “crush” on Elon Musk was “dangerous to democracy.” The Pentagon signed a contract with the billionaire’s SpaceX company in 2023 to provide internet service in Ukraine, among other deals. If the likes of Musk or Jeff Bezos were Eastern European businessmen, they would be casually described as oligarchs instead of “billionaires”. And one could argue no Slavic oligarch has ever accumulated as much power as Musk has today, for that matter.

For example, the very fact that Musk-led DOGE is playing a (still unclear) oversight role over federal government agencies (including the Pentagon, who is refusing to comply with Musk’s requests) mean that a major contractor is oversighting his contractees. It is not just a blatant conflict of interest, but rather the proverbial fox in the henhouse.

And such interests, private and public, have a lot to do with energy and minerals. Hot topics such as AI and cryptocurrency (not to mention cryptocurrency mining), at first glance, appear to be quite “ethereal” or immaterial issues in a digital, post-industrial world. The reality, as I pointed out some time ago, is that all of that demands a lot of computer processing, which is powered by electricity.

Hence, it consumes huge amounts of energy, thereby bringing about more global emissions, more electronic waste (hardware obsolescence is a thing), and impacting natural resources and the environment, just like the seemingly more “material” traditional mining of minerals on the earth.

In fact one cannot exist without the other. A report from the Oregon Group called “Artificial Intelligence and the next critical mineral supercycle” predicts that the “explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) [is] expected to spark a 10-year critical mineral supercycle as the massive energy needs of new AI data centers will increase pressure on global supply chains already under strain to meet global net-zero targets.”

It argues that “years of underinvestment in new mines, concentrated supply and processing in high-risk regions, as well as rising demand for minerals to meet net-zero targets, means supply will struggle to keep pace with the potential AI demand that is only now starting to be appreciated.”

According to market intelligence firm International Data Corporation, AI consumes so much power that data centers consumption is expected to double between 2023 and 2028—this is even bringing back demands for nuclear power. To illustrate this, consider the fact that Microsoft is using the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power is data centers. Similarly, Amazon last year purchased a data center in Pennsylvania powered by the  Susquehanna Steam nuclear power station.

So much is talked about the miracles of the so-called “post-industrial” world, but the hard truth, as I wrote before, is that industrialization and manufacturing are still key for both great powers and emerging powers in the 21st century. “Neoliberalism” is dead as well, and things once described as hopelessly démodé such as procurement mandates, good old protectionism, and subsidies are not only back but are blooming everywhere. Moreover, economic nationalism is once more pertinent—and, in the New Cold War, so are industry and trade wars, as seen with Biden’s own subsidy war against Europe itself.

One may also remember Biden’s bold territorial grab, by means of claiming a vast portion of the ocean floor (from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic) through an executive measure. It is of course no coincidence that those are resource-rich areas where “critical minerals” can be found, which are needed for the very renewable energy projects which the Biden administration had deemed “key national security concerns”. This was about securing hard minerals so as to ensure “American economic prosperity and national security”, as James Kraska (US Naval War College Professor) put it at the time.

If this sounds a lot like “Trumpism before Trump”, this might mean one needs, once again, to reconsider the very notion of “trumpism”. Trump’s claims about Greenland should be understood along these same lines. If “Trumpism” is a thing at all, then it is characterized mostly by matters of style, bluntness and by the will to step on the accelerator, so to speak.

In its own way, Donald Trump’s tariff threats are in fact a continuation of his predecessor’s economic warfare policies. Those are dangerous wars inasmuch as they have the potential to turn things into existential threats. This being so, it might be quite risky to “corner” a great power such as China in this manner—when it comes to lesser powers such as Canada and even Europe, however, the only risk Washington faces has to do with alienating partners and with the whole thing backfiring the way we are already seeing with Mexico.

The point is that the quest for re-industrialization and today’s economic wars provide the context for the geopolitical and geoeconomic angle of AI I’m trying to highlight. With an empowered Elon Musk and with big tech oligarchs similarly aligned with Trump’s regime one should expect things to unfold along these lines in a faster and blunter manner.

For a number of reasons, Trump might be bent on “ending the Ukrainian war”, as he puts it, in his own rushed and straight-forward manner—but in case there will be plenty of other wars to be fought. And many of them will be fought over minerals for energy and for the superpower’s AI race—in the Arctic region, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.

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