(Zero Hedge)—Sriram Krishnan, Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, joined the Monday edition of TBPN to explain why the U.S.-UAE AI Partnership is a strategic victory for the United States in its race to lead AI development against China, a perspective largely (and unsurprisingly) overlooked by mainstream media.
EXCLUSIVE: we asked @sriramk to break down the $600B deal announced last week by @WhiteHouse.
“We signed the first AI acceleration partnership. There are 3 critical components to this deal.”
“First, this represents a large investment in US data centers and US AI infrastructure.… https://t.co/cL4RUfgTRV pic.twitter.com/8MRimP0rMg
— TBPN (@tbpn) May 19, 2025
SRIRAM KRISHAN: We signed the first AI acceleration partnership. You guys probably read about in the press, but there are probably three important components that just, I wanted to have the technology brothers have the alpha and the have the first group on that. The most important part, the first part, is that this represents a large investment in U.S. data centers and U.S. AI infrastructure. So these countries will be investing in U.S. AI infrastructure. To make them as equal, if not larger, than the data centers and infrastructure they’re building back home. So this means, obviously a large infusion of capital revenue to data centers here in America.
JORDI HAYS: That story was kind of lost. Right? I feel like a lot of the focus was on localized investment and infrastructure.
JOHN COOGAN: To break it down in language that a venture capitalist could understand. This is something like what we’re seeing with Stargate where there’s a ton of capital forming and that’s coming from SoftBank, but it’s also coming from Middle Eastern investment funds and sovereign nations investing in American infrastructure. And then there’s a whole host of companies that might come in the stack to actually build a new data center. Is that right?
SRIRAM KRISHAN: Exactly. You should be doing our talking points. I would say, look, these countries have AI ambitions, right? They want to buy American AI. They wanna buy our semiconductors. They want to buy our large language model. They want to use us. And so as a part of this deal, they’re agreeing to a few things. The most important thing they’re gonna agree to is that capital, like you mentioned, right? Like, and, and this is, by the way, net new. This is not part of any existing project. Sure. These net new deals will mean infrastructure being built out physically in the US.
So for example, if they build out X megawatts of gigawatts of capacity, yep. This will mean the same X megawatts of gigawatts of capacity in the US, and this is an important point. Because some of the chatter has been, Hey, how does America maintain its lead? Well, one of the ways we maintain our lead is everything that is being built up by our allies. We get a matching deal back home. So that’s probably the number one headline.
The second headline would be that the vast majority of the GPUs that are as a part of this deal, which is gonna be, say, hosted in the UAE, will be hosted, run, operated by American hyperscaler companies, right? And so, you probably know them all, right? These would be large American companies who. They will be running it, hosting it, maintaining, and this is actually important because this represents an expansion opportunity for all of our companies. This means they would get to win market share away from competition from other countries. And obviously there’s a whole huge amount of revenue and ecosystem coming in. And so that’s the second key point, the vast majority of the GPUs are going to be run by American companies, often by a lot of our friends in these large, uh, you know, hyperscaler companies.
And the third point, and this is, again, something just lost in the chatter, is I’m sure you’ve heard questions about, Hey, how do we make sure these GPUs, you know, don’t get to somebody they don’t need to be. So there are rigorous security protocols in place, so every GPU gets shipped over. We are gonna make sure that, a., they can’t be physically diverted. These are really large boxes. You can’t hide them under your t-shirt or your tux and kind of stick them out the door. You can’t really go George Clooney Oceans 11 on them. So one is there’s going to be a large amount of physical verification and physical security protocols.
The second is remote access. We are gonna make sure through these deals, through the framework that nobody who’s not supposed to have access, especially from countries of concern, can get access.
And so these three kinds of the core pillars, and here’s why this event, right? And I think everybody in your audience who’s like a technology person, a technology brother, or in the software world, here’s why they’ll understand it. What has history taught as a software industry? The company with the biggest network effect, the biggest ecosystem wins, right? We’ve all grown up with Microsoft. How did Microsoft win with the Windows and Office ecosystem? Think about this as the American AI ecosystem.
We are getting these resource-rich countries who are critical allies in very interesting geopolitical places to basically adopt the American AI stack, right? Up and down. This means they are going to be part of our ecosystem for years and decades to come, and it essentially forms a shield from them ever adopting or using technology or working closely with some people that we don’t want them to work with. In a way, I kind of think of this like a software ecosystem play, where we now have them tied to the American AI ecosystem.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
