The Stargate Initiative and the Return of Digital Empire
Infrastructure with a Passport Stamp
As of 7 May 2025, OpenAI’s Stargate project, launched earlier in the year to presidential fanfare, is marketed as a benevolent global investment in AI infrastructure. But this is not merely a corporate strategy. It is an initiative explicitly coordinated with the United States government and designed to cement US-led AI leadership across national borders.
Open AIs global ambition is sweeping. A worldwide network of supercomputing hubs and “democratic AI” platforms, embedded within the governmental and economic machinery of partner nations. But “democratic,” as used here, is not a universal ideal. It is a brand. And the brand is licensed through political alignment with Washington.
OpenAI states openly that “partnering closely with the US government is the best way to advance democratic AI.” This is not an open-source moment for global governance, but rather a geopolitical operating system with a default setting.
“Democratic AI” or American Soft Power?
The initiative casts itself as a bulwark against “authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power.” But that binary breaks down under even mild scrutiny.
Consider the Trump administration, which stood alongside OpenAI during the project’s announcement. This is an administration that has:
- Challenged the rule of law by undermining judicial independence and attacking law firms.
- Attacked democratic allies and multilateral institutions.
- Sought to centralise executive power, at times beyond constitutional boundaries.
To frame this administration’s collaboration with OpenAI as the standard-bearer of “democratic AI” raises troubling questions. Are we exporting principle, or partisan infrastructure? When democracy is defined as “whatever aligns with US political interests,” the distinction between open society and soft authoritarianism becomes blurred.
Sovereignty by Subscription
OpenAI promises to help countries build national AI infrastructure. But these partnerships are neither neutral nor independent. The models will be controlled by OpenAI. The data centres, while physically located in-country, will almost certainly be aligned to US security standards and commercial licensing models. Countries are not building capacity. They are importing dependency.
The term “sovereignty” becomes performative when the tools, protocols, and update pathways are maintained outside national borders. A localised ChatGPT does not confer autonomy if it cannot be audited, modified, or replaced.
From Economic Development to Strategic Capture
The initiative offers to fund national startup ecosystems in tandem with OpenAI and local governments. But this is not an act of developmental generosity. It is a strategic investment in platform lock-in. New businesses will be born into an ecosystem where the stack is predefined and the economic rents flow back to OpenAI and its partners.
This is how modern empire operates: not through flags and armies, but through infrastructure and licensing agreements.
The Myth of Multipolar AI
By setting itself up as the only ethical alternative to authoritarian models, OpenAI eliminates the space for genuine multipolarity. The global South, Europe, and even mid-sized economies are faced with a stark choice: integrate with OpenAI, or risk obsolescence. And be under no illusion. The Trump Administration will use all its financial and political clout to “encourage” adoption of the US version of “AI democracy”. But integration means acquiescence to a narrow version of democratic alignment. One defined by US commercial, political, and cultural norms.
There is no room here for national experimentation, sovereign AI governance, or divergent value frameworks. The rails have already been laid.
Behind the Brand, a Blueprint
Stargate is not simply a technology initiative. It is a blueprint for digital governance aligned with American interests, executed through the language of freedom and cooperation. The promise of democratic AI, when tied explicitly to one nation’s vision of democracy, becomes less about liberation and more about alignment.
And so we are left with a final question: if the alternative to authoritarian AI is a version shaped by an increasingly illiberal superpower, what kind of “democracy” is really being exported?