2026-03-14 00:52:43
In the previous article, we visited Britain, Egypt, and Greece. Today, we’re going to journey through India, China, and Japan, and see how their different geographies pushed their architectures in different directions compared to those around the Mediterranean and in Britain.
Whereas all of Egypt’s water comes from one single river, India’s water comes from one single season, the monsoon.
This has determined India’s architecture. A big chunk of its land (and most of its population) is in the Ganges Valley:
That valley is criss-crossed by the Ganges and its tributaries. When the monsoon floods the rivers, they bring sediment with them to fertilize the land. Water and sediment mean lots of people, and the rivers allow for cheaper trade. So many cities emerged on their riverbanks.
In the dry season, waters go down tremendously, though. So how do you make sure you can access the river at all times?
So water in India arrives dramatically, it leaves dramatically; it structures trade, it structures agriculture; it determines good years and bad years; it determines survival. Water cycles mean life and death. So they drive religion, pilgrimages, life and death rites.
In places where water is scarcer, it’s even more important. So people store it.
If you build storage for water, and water is holy, you end up building a decorated, inverted pyramid.
But you can only do that when it’s easy to carve into the ground.
There are also temples carved into stone from the ground. They are not built by adding material, but by subtracting. In the case above, it’s carved inside a mountain from the Deccan, a massive volcanic plateau made of basalt. It can be extremely hard, but here it has joints and planes that can be exploited for carving.
As with pyramids, one of the reasons to do this is that it makes the building very bulky, which means temperature will be stable and fresh—ideal in the scorching heat of India.
These structures still need to stand, but they’re heavy, so we see small indoor spaces and lots of columns again.
Have you seen this type of video? Same energy.
This video is from tropical Australia, where extreme weathering by constant rain and heat makes laterite, a certain type of soil that hardens with air. People can make bricks out of it.
West Bengal, which has lots of this laterite, uses bricks for its temples.
The result of these types of stone (laterite, sandstone, limestone, soapstone…) is that it’s not strong enough to create big indoor spaces without arches, but carving is easy, so decorations are extreme.
You combine these elements, and you get things like the inverted temple stepwell of Rani-ki-Vav:
However, not all India is like this. In some areas, it rains a lot more:
In Kerala, you need tiered slopes on your roofs that carry the water off, and since this is a mountainous area, timber is more available to make those. Since you don’t want this water to run on the walls, you’ll add cornices that eject the water out.
But in this area, the climate is very hot and humid, and you want air to circulate all the time to refresh you and to avoid mold, so houses have a central opening.
The Nalukettu was born.
It evolved into a system of courtyards surrounded by homes, so that extended families could live under one roof, each with their own space.
So you can see some of the elements that have driven Indian architecture:
Water is sacred
Access to fluctuating river water levels requires ghats
In drier areas, people dug wells that could also capture monsoon water, and since they’re sacred, they became temples like inverted pyramids
Carve structures into the ground to protect against temperature swings
Where it rains the most, protect your head and your home with slanted roofs, especially with tiered slopes, so that the cascading water doesn’t accumulate too much energy and make holes in the ground
Have an internal courtyard to make sure air circulates well
We see similar patterns in China. In the Loess Plateau, where stone is easy to work, people would carve decorations and homes into the mountain.
This protected from the extreme temperature swings throughout the year and between day and night.
Kerala’s Nalukettus are mirrored in the Chinese siheyuan.
They also have homes around a central courtyard, made to optimize airflow and allow for a central common area.
Now take this concept and bring it to the mountains, where harder transportation means less communication and trade across valleys, more cultural distance with your neighbors, less political unity, and more conflict. You get the Tulous, semi-fortified community homes with a central courtyard.
The Forbidden City, in Beijing, uses the same logic, just on a bigger scale.
We see:
Axial distribution, to wow visitors
North-south orientation
Walls and a moat, to protect against intruders
The closer to the center, the more intimate the dwelling
Social courtyards
The nesting from outside to inside is continued through the Imperial City and the Inner City.
Unlike in India, however, Chinese architecture stands out for its use of wood:
Why so much more wood?
India’s civilization emerged across the Indus and Ganges River Valleys, which have access to sandstone (e.g. in Rajasthan). It also spread quickly across the Deccan Plateau—the mountains in the center—where stone is available, which is very useful to avoid rot and insulate against the heat.
China originates in the North China Plain, an alluvial plain made by the sediments brought by the Yellow River. This means rock is under a deep layer of soil, hard to reach. But there was a lot of timber here.
This region is much farther north, so it’s colder, and timber is better at trapping and storing heat. Also, stone can trap water and break with too many cycles of freezing and thawing (because water takes up more space as ice, and pushes against the stone), but timber is flexible, so it doesn’t break as easily with these cycles.
Also, the North China Plain has many more earthquakes than India, and stone is bad for earthquakes since it can’t flex at all. Stone buildings tend to crumble during earthquakes, while timber ones survive.
For all these reasons, China used much more timber in its architecture. And that has its own sets of challenges.
For example, when you’re making your walls in stone, they can carry the weight of the entire structure. It would be expensive to do the same with timber, so instead, timber architecture tended to have strong wooden columns to carry the weight and light timber for the walls.
Look at the beams, columns, and wooden roof of the Shanhua Temple:
One of the positive things about wood, of course, is that it’s lighter, so indoor spaces could be bigger.
But you don’t want your wooden walls to rot, so they should avoid contact with monsoon rains. The answer is a roof with long eaves that allow for a deep overhang:
That way, water is ejected far from the wall and doesn’t touch it. It’s also why the Chinese roofs are curved, as you can see in the background in this pic. This allows water to run out fast and be projected outwards, farther from the wall.
Curbing the wood had another advantage: Over long periods of time, gravity makes wood sag downward. So to avoid that, the Chinese curbed wood upward. Once you start doing that, it makes sense to push it for aesthetic purposes, to make the roof “reach for the sky”.
Notice what’s below the roof? That’s called a dougong, and is very typical of Chinese architecture. It’s to support the weight of the roof. Why?
With big indoor spaces, roofs are heavy.
But they can’t rest on walls like in Europe, because they’re made of light timber instead of stone. So they must rest on the timber columns.
They must support the eaves, which have a deep overhang as we just mentioned.
Architects needed a system made of interlocking timber that could be flexible during earthquakes.
The dougong was the solution—nested brackets that could reach far into the eave to support it.
Of course, once you have this type of structure, you might as well decorate it:
And it’s not just for dougongs. Anything, really. Columns? Roofs? All of it. Because timber is super easy to carve, so it’s easy to decorate.
And roof tiles are all mass-produced, so the casting mold can make them pretty.
You might have noticed that there’s a lot of red in here. That’s because, after all we’ve done to protect our wood, it still needs protection from the Sun and rain, so it must be coated. Some of the coats don’t have much color, but those that did were frequently red, as it’s the most common dye color that exists. Imperial buildings used the less common cinnabar, which you might associate with opulent traditional Chinese buildings.
Of course, there are a million other specificities of Chinese architecture, but what I find fascinating about all of this is that so many of these specificities are the result of simple geographic differences—in the case of China, the widespread use of timber instead of stone.
2026-03-12 05:57:02
All buildings everywhere are the same—the International Style.
Towers of concrete, steel and glass. We mourn for the traditional architectures of yesteryear, without realizing why.
Why are these buildings the same everywhere?
And why were they so different before? Is it just a matter of globalization, or is there something more?
Here’s a little known fact: A lot of the world’s architecture was the consequence of geography.
In some cases, it’s easy to see, such as steep roofs in places with heavy snowfall.
But the depth of the influence of geography is hard to grasp. So today, we’re going to take a trip across different world architectures to see how geography influenced them: Egypt, Ancient Greece, India, China, Japan, and Britain. As we do, we’re not just going to learn why things are the way they are, we’re also going to understand what elements we could bring back to our architectural styles today.
Here’s a map of Britain’s soils, along with some of its most notable architecture.
The island’s geology changes strikingly, from oldest in the north to youngest in the south. Every type of stone gave birth to a different type of architecture.
Aberdeen is famous for its dark granite. We can also find granite in southwest England around Dartmoor, and sure enough, there, homes tend to be made of granite. Edinburgh has sandstone, evident in its sand-colored buildings. Golden limestone is common around Bristol, and old country houses are golden as a result. The soil in the surroundings of London is the result of sediment accumulation, so there’s much less stone to go around. But there’s clay, which can be made into bricks. Sure enough, London is full of brick buildings. The chalk in South and East England is too brittle for walls, but use timber frames, fill the wall with twigs, wet soil and straw, and then whitewash it with a solution made with chalk, and these homes can last centuries if well maintained. For the roof, use thatch.
Once the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, the cheapness of canal and train transportation meant bricks for walls and Welsh slate for roofs could be used everywhere, so they were.1
So stone is important. But it’s not all-encompassing. What else matters? Let’s travel far back in time to Ancient Egypt to figure this out.
What do these have in common?
Big monuments
Bold geometric lines
Light brown color
Lots of rows of things, notably columns
For temples and tombs
Why?
The Egyptian government always had massive power because it controlled the Nile and knew how much food it would grow, so it could tax it precisely. The farmers couldn’t escape because the country is surrounded by desert and sea. So the government was extremely powerful and had lots of resources at its disposal.
If you want to project power, the best way to do that is to build big things.
But building technology is not very advanced. If you make a big column of stuff, it falls. How do you build a huge thing so that it doesn’t break and fall apart? You pile matter into a mountain.
Stacked mass is the simplest way to create stable height. That’s why we find it across the world, not just in Egypt.
Stacked mass has another benefit: If you can make an indoor space inside, It protects you from temperature swings because of the thermal mass stored in the stone/dirt.
But these spaces must be small: All that mass risks collapsing on you. As a result, no grand indoor halls, only small rooms.
With flat roofs, because why would you slant them? It’s difficult and expensive, and unnecessary in places with little rain like in Egypt.
The rooms you do have need plenty of columns to support them.
But you want to make lots of big columns, so everybody knows you’re such a powerful ruler! So you’re going to use your millions of minions to build many rows of these columns. Except how do you coordinate these minions? You need to standardize. Most columns, or rows of stuff, need to be as similar as possible.
You haven’t learned yet how to do arches well, so the moment your windows are too big, your walls fall. So small windows.
Notice how it’s also very axial: Lots of these buildings are constructed along a main line (axis).
Axial architecture is meant to wow you as you arrive and follow the line towards the entrance. These structures tend to be organized along cosmic lines, like cardinal directions, solstices, etc.
If you’re aligned with the stars, your architecture is cosmic, it has meaning tied to the sun, the moon and the stars, so you as a ruler surely must be cosmically ordained.
Since you have constructed lots of big buildings and columns, you now have all these surfaces. What can you do with them? Maybe depict your grandiosity and how cozy you are with the gods. And since you have plenty of money and workers available, you can arrange this:
Notice how there’s plenty of carving? Stone is normally hard to carve. But not all stone. Most Egyptian architecture is made of limestone and sandstone, which is relatively soft.
Why? It’s what Egypt had available. Carrying big blocks of stone is not easy, so Egyptians mostly quarried them close to the Nile and used the river to transport them.
And Egypt used to be a shallow ocean—Tethys. This is why today it has some of the biggest depressions on Earth, enough to make them into seas again.
As a shallow seabed, it teemed with life, so its floor got covered by those sediments: shells. As they compressed, they became limestone. As sand compressed, it became sandstone. They are both a similar white-brownish color.2
Both are easy to work with copper tools, and hold up well when compressed, so they’re ideal to cut and stack as blocks to form shapes. Which is why Egyptian blocks are so geometrically accurate, unlike those in Mycenae:
The grandiosity, the connection with the seasons and the cosmos… all of this fits well with the Ancient Egyptian mindset—a civilization that lasted thousands of years with very little change, because the geography is so stable:
The Nile’s annual flooding, which was measurable, cyclical, drove all work, and generated the most wealth (and the food needed to survive!)
Isolated from other civilizations through desert and sea
Strong governmental control because it’s so easy to tax the Nile’s production, so state stability
And that’s how you get the Egyptian Aesthetic:
Mostly limestone and sandstone, and their ochre colors
Their tech was ideal for compression, not spanning, so no windows, no big indoor spaces
But lots of resources, so just pile up stuff and create many of the same thing
Focus it all on your grandiosity: big piles of stuff, long lines of columns/decorations, all along a strong, impressive line, aligned with the cosmos to create a sense of godlike legitimacy
Flat roofs: just protect against the Sun and its heat, not rain
Market yourself through messaging on the walls, mostly through carving, adding color when possible
It all fits the philosophy of the place: not dynamism, progress, or experimentation, but permanence, continuity, and repetition.
While Egypt is flat and desertic, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Greece is extremely mountainous.
This is because Africa subsided for a long time below Eurasia, and pushed the mountains up on the European and Asian side.
With so many mountains, Greece has abundant workable stone, including limestone, but also another type that was uncommon in Egypt—marble.
Marble starts as limestone: shells and tiny marine organisms that are compressed together, with other particles that cement them and some void that forms between them. That makes it easy to carve, but you can’t use too much detail or your edges will round or chip.
When limestone goes deeper down inside the Earth, it gets more compressed and heated. These particles fuse into interlocked crystals. These are much harder to separate, so the stone is harder and breaks more cleanly, as crystals remain together. You can polish these crystals into a very smooth surface, and their varying angles will scatter light in different directions, making the stone shiny and luminous.3
Naturally, the Greeks played with the ability to finely shape the marble and with its light. For example, notice the vertical lines on these columns? They’re called flutes.
In hard Mediterranean light, small changes in depth create strong shadows. Since the flutes surround the columns, the sun will hit different flutes differently, creating different shadows. Together, all these alternating lights and shadow lights give a sense of vertical elegance to the temples, multiplying the effect of the columns themselves.
Marble allows you to play with light and shadow much more than other types of stone.
Columns shouldn’t be perfectly straight, though, because the base carries more weight than the top, and the center tends to bulge because it’s not as supported as the top of the bottom, so the Greeks used entasis:
Notice the pediment, the triangular shape on top of the columns three pictures back? Why triangular? Because it had to hold a slanted roof to evacuate rain—something that was not needed in Egypt because it basically never rains there, given the difference in latitudes.
Thankfully, Greece also has access to plenty of clay that could be fired for roof tiles, something that temples had at the time, which many people don’t realize because roofs crumble more than columns, so most Greek architecture doesn’t show them anymore.
You need something to support that roof and pediment—the lintel, that horizontal beam that spans across columns.
And since we’re in the mountains here in Greece, the ground is uneven, so you need to place your temple on top of a platform to even it out, the stepped platform.4
We have now rebuilt from first principles the most iconic aspects of Greek architecture.
Notice another detail about this type of architecture:
Marble can be cut with extreme precision. When two marble blocks are perfectly dressed, the contact surface is large, the friction is high, and compression loads transfer cleanly, preventing blocks from sliding.
Stonemasons realized they could make do without cement, which added a paste that was less elegant, uneven, and was actually bad for earthquakes—of which there are a fair amount in the region, if you recall the tectonics. With sufficient precision, dry contact is stronger than cement.
You can’t just pile blocks and hope they don’t move at all, though, especially during earthquakes, so masons carved a hole in the blocks and placed iron clamps to hold them together.
The post-and-lintel structure (columns with a beam on top of them) doesn’t allow for big indoor spaces, so these temples were not designed to hold lots of people, just the statue of the temple’s god and a few other artifacts.
As a result, congregations happened outdoors. Altars were in front of the temples, and that’s where animal sacrifices were held.
Why have a temple at all then? First, because it provided shade on hot days and cover on rainy days. Second, it was a way to convey wealth and success. This meant that the external appearance of the temple was more important than the inside. Hence the flutes and the entasis, and also all other kinds of decorations.
Early on, the style of column tops was pretty basic (Doric), but as time went by, the Greeks explored ways to decorate them further without jeopardizing temple integrity. With the Ionic, and later Corinthian styles, they achieved thinner columns and added more flutes and decorations. The same was true of the friezes above the columns.
These styles evolved relatively fast, because architecture was one of the ways to compete with other Greek city-states, and there were many.
With so many mountains, Greece couldn’t connect overland easily, and ended up with lots of small valleys developing semi-independent cities in each.
You can see some of them if you zoom in on the region:
I assume that most architecture at the time was trial and error, but errors in architecture are bad, so when builders found new, better shapes, others would adopt the same recipe without questioning it too much, and this resulted in pretty standardized sizes for any architectural element: column height, width, spacing, size of pediments, of friezes… everything.
We can see how so many aspects of Ancient Greek architecture are direct results of the region’s geography (and the technology they had at the time): mountains, sunlight, and infrequent rains:
Mountains provided lots of stone, including marble, which promoted the development of precision masonry
Mountains are also uneven ground for construction, so Greeks developed bases (crepidoma) of one or more levels for their buildings
The harsh sun necessitated shade, which required columns to support a roof
The harsh sun, together with precision masonry, pushed the aesthetic limits: flutes, capitals, friezes, perfect stone blocks, waiving cement
But since there’s also rain in the region, roofs had to be sloped, with tiles, which begat the triangular pediment
The technology was not advanced enough to allow for big indoor spaces though, so most ceremonies still happened outdoors.
In other words: Although Greece is just across the Mediterranean from Egypt, its slightly different geography (more mountains, more rain)5 brought a different architectural language.
This is enough for today. We’ve seen how geology determines the stone available, and how that drives the type of architecture that is possible and unfolds. In the next article, we’re going to move to Asia, and cover India, China, and Japan, and then we’re going to bring it home: Why are all buildings the same now, and how can we do them differently, if we wanted?
I got the idea for this section from Lewis Dartnell and his great book Origins.
We now mostly just see their structure, but in the past, some parts of the Egyptian sandstone and limestone walls were heavily decorated and colored. This detail has mostly washed away over time.
Many of the typical Greek structures were first developed with limestone, and marble only helped push them to the extremes of perfect cut, perfect alignment, no need for cement, or perfect polish.
The crepidoma was a base made of three steps
And slightly more advanced technology on average, as Egypt had been building temples and pyramids for literally thousands of years before Greece started building its most beautiful temples. For example, the time between the Giza Pyramids and the Parthenon is the same as the time between the creation of the Roman Empire and us. So the most famous Egyptian buildings used old technology. The Greeks inherited and then improved upon this type of Egyptian know-how.
2026-03-05 21:03:38
It’s 2050, and the Middle East is a mess.
Iran is in the midst of a civil war between different factions of the IRGC and the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Kurds, and the Azeris.
In the northwest, the Kurds have established an independent state. They are de facto ruling the Kurdish parts of Syria and Iraq too, and are in a low-intensity conflict with Turkey.
Azerbaijan enlarged its surface area by taking parts of northwestern Iran, but now is engulfed in a civil war itself.
Iraq is split between the northeastern Kurdistan, western ISIS, and Sunni and Shia militias and mujahideen.
Hejaz has split from Saudi Arabia, and there’s a three-way war waging between them and the Houthis to the south, in Yemen.
Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon are in a defense pact under Israel, trying to suppress Palestinian guerrilla warfare together.
The former rulers of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Equatorial Guinea all live in Dubai: They escaped from the coups in their countries. They financially support Dubai’s army in its fight to secede from Abu Dhabi, which has dramatically increased national taxes to make up for the loss of oil income.
Elsewhere in the world, Russia is now a failed state ruled by oligarchs fighting it out in Moscow neighborhoods. The Stans have moved closer to China, which is ruling de facto Russia’s easternmost Siberian regions. Belarus is now a neutral state, and is working to join the EU. Its strongest supporter is EU member Ukraine.
Venezuela and Cuba are now firmly under the US’s grasp. Iran and Russia can’t afford to prop them up anymore.
Nigeria, Congo, Chad, and Angola are failed states in constant civil war.
Nobody cares about any of these.
This might happen as oil demand peaks in a few years and then drops. How could we get there? How can we avoid it? This is what we’ll discuss today.
We saw in the previous article that peak oil might come in the 2030s, and within a couple of decades, demand might have plummeted due to renewables and batteries.
This is how dependent many countries are on oil and gas income:
The average oil-rich government is 2x to 3x larger than the average non-oil government, even at the same income level. As a fraction of the economy, the governments tower over the private sector and all other actors.
Also, all this wealth is concentrated in a few physical points of extraction, so if you control them, and the transit routes to transport the oil and gas to international markets, you control all the wealth. This is why virtually all the rulers of oil countries are authoritarian: The resource curse is especially salient in oil & gas countries.
We showed how bad oil has been for democracy in Venezuela, but this is true across the world.
As countries decolonized, the more oil they had, the less democratic they became.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the more democratic countries have more accountable governments, more freedom of the press, and more freedom of association: Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey… The countries with lots of oil—Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran… have more authoritarian governments.
When a resource is easy to control and extract, whoever does the controlling also does the ruling, and they don’t need to share it with anybody. Well, just enough to keep people quiet and content. So corruption is rampant, inflation destroys other industries, citizens live off of government handouts, and these countries develop little else to offer to the world.
Countries where revenue comes from taxes rather than oil and gas are much more transparent, and spend their money on many more services than O&G countries: Taxpayers demand accountability. They want to know where their hard-earned money is going, and they want to see the results. Meanwhile, in a resource-based government, citizens are just happy to get a share of the loot. They don’t complain too much, so they can keep suckling mama government’s tit.
The lack of transparency in O&G countries leads to corruption and entrenched interests, because a lot of the revenue is hidden, so it can be diverted. Those who do the diverting accumulate the money and buy out allies, who keep them in power.
Since it’s bad optics to have much more income than spend, most of these countries update their spending in bonanza years. When commodity prices drop, their economies crash.
To avoid fiscal troughs that bring them down, they focus their spend on short-term initiatives, which means long-term infrastructure is not prioritized. When it is, revenue shortfalls means they might not be maintained, or even worse, they might be abandoned halfway through.
When the resource is exhausted, they have no fallback, and the country goes to ruin, as we saw in the previous article The Resource Cliff. Governments, without the money to finance their security apparatus, fall. This provides an opening to those who own the weapons to do the only thing they know to do—fight to capture what little power remains… and the country descends into civil war, like in Yemen.
Which countries are most exposed?
Now, imagine you’re the ruler of one of these countries. You know these things. What do you do?
Many of these countries will deny this is happening. The OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) projections show an increase in overall demand for fossil fuels from now to 2045. Wishful thinking. Most of these countries won’t be properly prepared when this hits.
Oil and gas countries and companies try to postpone the end of oil. The US under Trump is actually a great example—remember, the US is the world’s largest oil producer. In 2025, Trump increased subsidies for fossil fuel producers, weakened environmental laws, gutted Biden-era support for clean energy and moved to block clean energy projects, even some that were near completion. The US formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January this year.
Academics split the strategies to fight the transition to renewable energies into two types:
Pre-shift strategies, founded on explicit climate denial: spread doubt, question science, lobby, revolving doors1.
Post-shift strategies: subtler forms of climate action delay through the readaptation of lobbying and revolving doors, the conviction that fossil fuels are irreplaceable (necessitarianism), the adoption of a green façade (greenwashing), and blame placement towards their consumers (strategic blame placement).
I think these worked in the past, but not anymore: The engine of the transition is now economic; solar, wind, and batteries are just cheaper.
Personally, if I were a Middle Eastern government, the one thing I’d do to postpone the transition is to flood the market: The more oil I produce and sell, the lower the price, and the less competitive renewables become. I think this could postpone the twilight of fossil fuels by a few years or even decades, but I don’t think they would do it: This would drop the price of barrels, on which their finances depend. Also, at this point, it might be too late, as China has firmly decided to push this transition.
If you know your oil sales are about to vanish, you have two options:
Agree with other oil providers to limit supply over demand, so that prices remain high for as long as you can.
Pump like there’s no tomorrow, so that you can extract as much value while you still can.
According to this paper, what will happen is the 2nd scenario. And it makes sense: It’s hard to keep dozens of countries limiting their production when they know their wealth is devaluing by the day. Also, if they kept prices up, that would only accelerate the transition to renewables.
So if I were a ruler of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the UAE and didn’t care about the environment, right now I would be investing to extract as much oil as possible, as fast as possible. Oil that remains now in the ground will remain in the ground.
This is the biggest way oil countries will fight the oil transition: If you know your golden goose is sick, you’ll try to find another one. They’re going to do it by buying foreign assets, investing in local projects, opening up to the world, and improving the productivity of their population.
The best example of this is Norway, which instead of spending its oil wealth, invests it all, and only spends 3% of the fund every year. The money is invested in assets across the world, mainly in the stock market.2
But it’s not the only one. There are equivalents for Oman, Qatar3, Azerbaijan4, Kazakhstan, Kuwait5, Saudi Arabia… They invest across geographies and industries, from Chinese petrochemicals to French luxury to Silicon Valley startups to Indonesian mining. For example:
Saudi Arabia’s PIF [Public Investment Fund] has pumped $45bn into SoftBank’s Vision Fund in 2016 and $20bn into a Blackstone infrastructure fund the following year. In the years since, it has splashed the cash in a diverse range of sectors from electric-car maker Lucid to its controversial LIV Golf venture, a cruise liner group, mining, sports assets and gaming firms. It also poured tens of billions into US and European equity markets and injected $2bn into a private equity venture set up by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The more these funds own a bit of everything, the less likely they are to lose all their money, and the more they will be able to rely on their returns for a steady future income.
Of course, they know the future of the world is in tech, so they focus on that a lot.
In March 2024, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) created MGX, a tech-investment company with a target size of $100bn, which will invest in AI infrastructure, such as data centres and chips. It has also set up a $10bn AI venture-capital fund. In Saudi Arabia a number of different funds with a combined firepower of $240bn will splurge on AI, data centres and advanced manufacturing.
E&, an Emirati telecoms company, will help to build part of a 45,000km-long subsea cable that makes its way around south Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean and Britain. A data-centre construction boom is under way, too, with the likes of Khazna, a unit of G42, and Damac, an Emirati property developer, building facilities.
Gulf companies are building data centres abroad, too. Damac is a longstanding business partner of Donald Trump, helping him manage golf courses in the Middle East (Hussain Sajwani, its boss, is known as the “Donald of Dubai”). On January 8th Mr Trump said that Damac would invest at least $20bn in data centres in America.
The Gulf recorded almost $8bn of foreign direct investment in tech infrastructure and another $2bn in software in 2024, up three-fold from 2017, according to fDi Markets, a data firm. Talent is moving, too. BCG, a consultancy, says that the AI talent pool in the UAE and Saudi Arabia has grown by over one-third and almost a fifth, respectively, since 2022.—The Economist
These countries realize they’ll need jobs for their citizens, too. They might also be wary of their foreign assets being seized. So they’re investing in national projects. The best example of this is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with about one trillion USD to invest. Half of that is invested in Saudi assets, on projects summarized in its Vision 2030. We’ll talk about this when we cover the special case of Saudi Arabia’s future in an upcoming article.
But if these countries develop their citizens’ abilities and make them more productive, maybe they can create as much wealth as what’s pumped from the ground today?
So these countries invest a lot in education and healthcare. Why do you think Saudi Arabia has started allowing women to work?6
This is a great start, but it’s not enough. Take Kuwait for example, with over 90% of government income from oil. They’d need the tax base of the rest of the economy to grow by 1000% to make up for the loss of oil. Normal productivity gains are 2% per year, and that’s in a dynamic economy like the US’s. How are these oil countries supposed to get their unproductive citizens, who have never had to fight in a hypercompetitive labor market, to suddenly become superproductive? It would take more than a generation to get there!
So one way to make up for it is to learn from the best: Welcome foreigners who can bring their know-how. This is the context in which many of these countries now allow alcohol consumption, despite being haram7. But why would foreigners go to countries like Saudi, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, or Kuwait, knowing they prioritize their own citizens? Wouldn’t they prefer going to Dubai, which has a track-record of openness, tolerance, and low taxes?
But foreigners don’t need to move for work to add value. They can also visit as tourists, and that’s why so many of these countries invest in this industry. Why do you think Abu Dhabi has a Louvre Museum?
It’s amazing, by the way. And so is teamLab’s installation there.
Abu Dhabi wants a full cultural district with facilities like these in Saadiyat Island.
It has also recently built the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Presidential Palace, Yas Island Attractions (Ferrari World, Warner Bros World, Yas Waterworld, Seaworld Abu Dhabi)... Abu Dhabi is among the most aggressive in this direction, but there are only so many trips people can take. Other countries will be competing for the same visitors.
What are the results of these efforts so far? There’s some progress, but in most countries, not near enough to escape the black hole of the future fossil fuel crash,8 so despite their diversification efforts, many will have to take more drastic measures, like selling assets and reducing costs.
Oil prices have already shrunk by 40% since their peak in 2022.9 As a result, many O&G countries are already facing financial problems, and some have been forced to sell assets.10 For example:
Kuwait is planning to sell a $7B pipeline stake in February of this year.
Saudi Aramco plans to raise $64B through privatizations in the next five years, including a $4B power plant sale within weeks.
Oman is aiming at divesting from 30 companies.
Nigeria is selling at least a 25% stake in some oil and gas fields.
Angola plans to privatize over 70 companies, including the sale of 30% of the state oil company Sonangol in an IPO.
Kazakhstan’s sovereign fund plans to divest from several state-run companies to privatize them.
This is good not just because it raises money for their states, but also because it professionalizes the management of the assets (making them more productive), reduces corruption and vested interests, and if it works well, it encourages foreigners to invest further in the countries.
The more prices fall, the more assets these countries will have to sell. Unfortunately, one-off sales might not be enough to cover ongoing spending.
So after trying to deny, and then postpone the reality of dwindling oil demand, they will try to squeeze oil sales, diversify their economy, and sell some assets. After all of that, most will still be short, so they will have to reduce their recurring costs pretty dramatically.
The first step is to shrink the share of citizens receiving benefits. This is what the new Kuwaiti emir has done: He has stripped tens of thousands of Kuwaitis from their citizenship, to:
…deliver Kuwait to its original people clean and free from impurities.
The following step? Reducing benefits to natives, including as education, healthcare, subsidies, civil servant jobs, and at some point, direct transfers.
That’s when people will revolt.
What will happen then?
Countries will have one of these options:
Transition to democracy.
Keep an iron grip on their countries’ politics. Become more authoritarian. Strengthen the secret police.
It does look like countries tend to move towards democracy after they reach their peak oil production:
If I had to guess, this will be more common than people think:
The Arab Spring showed that many people in the Middle East and North Africa want more democracy.
It’s not surprising, since many citizens from these countries have experienced the freedom and democracy of neighboring Europe.
Since then, mobile phones and social media have become widely accessible, increasing the flow of information from free countries towards more authoritarian ones.
Inshallah.
But in many countries, this transition won’t happen. So far, no country with as much oil wealth as Libya or Iraq, or even with half as much oil wealth as those, has ever made a successful transition to democracy.
Even if democratic elections are held, and the results are respected, those might well be the last meaningful elections, as whoever gains control of the central government is able to establish a kind of monopoly on power that precludes future challenges.
That’s if elections are held and if they’re respected.
In many cases, internal conflict might prevail, people won’t agree on leadership, and they’ll fall into civil wars and states of anarchy.
Russia (the USSR) invaded Afghanistan when oil prices were high, it became a failed state when prices shrank, Putin could only consolidate power when oil prices started growing again, and he went to war with Georgia and annexed Crimea when they were highest.
We saw something similar in Yemen, where revenue grew after unification and when it shrank, civil war exploded. Libya has been in a civil war ever since Gaddafi was deposed in 2011.
Whether they become democracies or not, their revenue will dry up, and with it their influence initiatives.
Muslim-majority countries constitute only about 23% of all countries,11 but by sheer coincidence, they control ~51% of oil exports. Not just in the Middle East. In sub-Saharan Africa (Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, which has a plurality of Muslims), South East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan)...
Some of this revenue has been dedicated to projecting Islam around the world:
Promotion of the practice and teaching of Islam, especially Salafi / Wahhabi:
Mosque construction, including monumental ones
Religious schools
Islamic universities
Religious materials
International Islamic organizations, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Muslim World League, or the Islamic Development Bank
Islamist parties, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood
International media such as Al Jazeera
Disaster relief and refugee aid
As these countries’ incomes shrink, their international influence initiatives will shrink too—especially from the countries that become failed states.
What about changes elsewhere in the world?
Russia is the one big superpower whose influence relies mainly on energy, as 30% of the government’s revenue comes from it. Lose the energy, and the country becomes fiscally insolvent. No more military incursions into neighboring countries, no more use of force to bully satellite countries like Belarus or Kazakhstan. Russia will have to withdraw from Central Asia, and won’t be able to maintain its support of governments like those in Cuba or Venezuela.
This won’t happen immediately, though, as a big share of Russia’s income comes from gas, which will take longer to be replaced than oil.
So far, we’ve talked mostly about the Middle East and North Africa, but there are other oil producers in the world.
Venezuela will be particularly affected by the transition, as most of its government’s income comes from oil, but it’s expensive to extract, so this will be among the first countries where oil companies will stop investing. The country will be forced to diversify, and some options it has include mining and agriculture, like its neighbor Brazil.
Congo, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Ecuador, and Nigeria are other countries that will see their coffers empty and will suffer tremendously. Expect some to become stronger democracies, and most to fall into civil war or into failed state status.
And as some players weaken, others strengthen.
Structurally, oil suppliers and demanders were at odds:
Democracies tend to develop faster, so they demand more oil
As we have seen, oil supply tends to produce authoritarian regimes
Democracies and authoritarian regimes tend to be at odds, because democracies challenge the monopoly on power of authoritarian regimes
So the world evolved into authoritarian suppliers of oil and democratic demanders. For decades, these global politics have hit consumers:
This will happen less and less, as wind and sunlight are much better distributed around the world.
Not only will energy be more reliable, but it will also be cheaper! Yay!
Before the US was a net exporter of oil and gas, it depended on the Middle East’s fuels. Knowing this, the US developed a long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and other oil producers in the region: They provided the oil, and the US provided the security.
Once the oil becomes less important, so will that alliance.
Middle Eastern countries will have to find new alliances. The obvious one is China—to whom Saudi Arabia sells more oil than to the US, for example. India is another partner these countries have been getting closer to. And, as the region becomes less relevant internationally, regional politics will become more important, with Israel as the biggest emerging power in the region (and maybe Iran if it frees itself from the current regime).
China was one of the countries most weakened by the importance of oil and gas. Releasing the importance of these resources is a boon for the country.
Also, the US is the world’s maritime superpower, so it could control the chokepoints of oil and gas distribution.
But if oil doesn’t flow through these straits anymore, the US can’t threaten China with energy famine anymore.
China is also the biggest provider of solar panels and batteries, and one of the biggest producers of the rare-earth metals they require. It will gain a commensurate amount of power.
Now, solar panels and batteries aren’t as critical as oil and gas, because solar panels and batteries are a fixed cost that lasts decades, while O&G are difficult and expensive to store, and are depleted with use, so they require ongoing purchases.
However, even if China excels at manufacturing, it’s not easy to keep these secrets under lock and key. Other countries could manufacture these products, even if not as cheaply. This reduces the leverage that China would have on other countries compared to what oil countries have today.
Today, China produces most of the world’s rare earth minerals, necessary for solar panels and batteries, among other things. But I don’t think that’s a long-term advantage: It’s not like these minerals only exist in China; it’s simply that China has been the most diligent in finding and mining them. The more China weaponizes their trade, the more other countries will look for these minerals—and find them.
The EU is the other big importer of energy. It also produces solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, albeit less than China. So it will gain the same benefits from the elimination of energy supply constraints as China.12
Another benefit of this transition for Europe will be the fact that it has been hobbled by the internal push to transition to green energy, which has brought it astronomical energy prices, and with those, industry has withered. As energy prices shrink and become similar to those in other countries, this disadvantage will fade.
We are likely to reach Peak Oil in the next few years, and fossil fuel consumption will drop in the following decades, replaced by wind, solar, batteries, and electrification. When that happens, there will be big shifts in the world:
For oil and gas countries:
They will try to fight this as much as possible, by pumping more oil, buying foreign assets, diversifying their economies, and attracting international talent and visitors.
This won’t be enough, and they’ll have to sell assets and reduce their costs, which will cause regime change:
Democracy is likely to increase
Many will try to become more authoritarian
Some will become failed states
The international influence of them all will dwindle. Since Islam is overrepresented in oil and gas countries, its influence will be particularly affected.
But the impact will not be limited to countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It will also affect others around the world, including Gabon, Angola, Nigeria, Brunei…
Russia’s superpower status will be challenged. It’s unlikely it will be able to maintain its sphere of influence.
For the rest:
Every consumer around the world will have more energy security. This is great for consumers.
The Middle East will shift its alliances, probably towards countries like China, India, and Israel.
China becomes the biggest winner, mainly because today it’s the country most weakened by this system and is working hard to position itself as a frontrunner of renewable energy technology.
Europe will be the other big winner, as it’s been hindered by its huge energy consumption, and the resulting high energy prices.
Overall, I think these changes are good for freedom, for consumers, and for the world in general. This is exciting!
Get ex-politicians to go work for oil & gas countries, so they can use their influence to favor them.
It avoids Norwegian assets (as a way to diversify and reduce corruption), commodities, private equity, venture capital, and any leveraged investment.
Investments in French assets, China, petrochemicals, real estate, media, telecom, retail (e.g. it owns Harrod’s), and AI (e.g. it invested in xAI). It owns big stakes in Volkswagen and London Heathrow Airport.
Apparently it focuses a lot on energy and infrastructure.
It looks like it invests mainly in financial institutions.
Since 2011, they’ve been able to access more and more industries, they don’t need permission from male guardians to work, they can drive, they can’t be discriminated against, they can hold jobs previously considered too dangerous…
Forbidden in Islam
According to the IMF, this is encouraging:I fear this is not enough.
With the war in Iran right now, prices are climbing fast. Right now we’re 35% below the peak, but in the budgets of the last year, it was closer to 40-45%.
Or debt on their assets
Muslims are about 30% of the world’s population.
Even though Europe exports less solar, wind, and battery energy as China, so it stands to gain a bit less than China.
2026-03-03 23:25:17
Israel and the US have started bombarding Iran again, killing its supreme leader Khamenei (and apparently many more leaders). Iran has been retaliating with its own missiles across the region. What will happen from here? Will the bombings continue? Until when? When the regime falls? That will be hard to accomplish. And how does that change the dynamics of the Cold War II between the US and China? How does that change wars in the 21st century? That’s what we’re going to look at today.
I wrote about this specific topic almost a year ago. I also wrote about Iran’s geopolitics, why Iran’s current government hates Israel and the US so much, and whether Iran was going to continue pursuing the nuclear bomb. Today’s article continues the series.
Israel and the US are bombing military and political leaders and assets throughout Iran, killing most notably its leader, Khamenei. Iran has retaliated with over 1,000 missiles and drones targeting Israel, US bases in the region, and even tourist areas like iconic hotels and the airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi (UAE), Doha (Qatar), and Kuwait.
The next few days are going to be decisive: They’re a race between Iran’s missiles and drones, US and Israeli bombings of Iran to eliminate them, missile and interceptor stockpile depletion, and the patience of all parties. Neither the Iranian nor Israeli governments are likely to blink: They are fighting a war of survival. But the US and Gulf Countries might, depending on how stockpiles and losses evolve.
How did we get here?
Two reasons:
Iran’s regime can never become friendly, because a big part of its legitimacy comes from vilifying the US and Israel. These countries decided to attack now because they still can.
The US is systematically working to dismantle China’s international sources of power, and Iran is a bastion of that power.
This section is a quick summary of this article.
Persia’s Shah used to be aligned with the West: He modernized the country, invited foreign investments, built a lot of infrastructure, improved literacy and healthcare…
The radical Islamists didn’t like this modernization, so they allied with the local Left to gain power, and succeeded in 1979.1 This means the entire legitimacy of the regime is based on opposing the US, its allies, and its values.
This would not have been a problem if Iran had limited itself to hating the US and Israel. Instead, they’ve threatened to attack and eliminate them for the last 47 years, and they haven’t limited themselves to empty threats. They’ve developed ballistic missile and nuclear weapon programs to be able to obliterate Israel, and maybe attack the US too.
For the last few decades, the US and Israel have tried to manage the situation, but the closer Iran is to getting nuclear weapons, the less they can tolerate it. Until recently, they were forced to because Iran was quite strong, with proxies in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. But after October 7th 2023, Israel has systematically eliminated most of them, so it and the US saw an opening last year to weaken Iran and its nuclear program, and took it. But that was just a delay. The truth is they will only be safe when this regime falls.
The problem is that achieving regime change is going to be very difficult.
Even if the US and Israel suppress Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, that won’t be enough to topple the government. No air-only attack has ever achieved that, and you can’t put boots on the ground in Iran. It’s a mountain fortress. Think Afghanistan in 2001, but with nearly 5x the population and much richer.
The recent strikes have killed the existing Supreme Leader, but there’s a long chain of command to replace him and any other leader killed through strikes. Then, there’s Khamenei’s Bayt, a group of 4,000 close employees who manage Khamenei’s affairs and power, and work as a shadow government mirroring the official one.
The organization is structured in an opaque way to prevent the entire chain of command from being wiped out, and was controlled by Khamenei and his four sons.
Through this body, Khamenei controlled the BMEE and AQR2, huge conglomerates of over 200 companies with interests in real estate, construction, industry, mining, energy, power, food, agriculture, tourism, transportation, IT, media…
Khamenei’s Bayt was also able to infiltrate the military and the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), a kind of Praetorian Guard with over 125,000 members sourced from the Basij militia, a bigger group of ~400,000 poor, Shia radical volunteers (and 25 million members!!) who police the country on behalf of the government.
All these groups have been groomed for decades to respond to the Khameneis and to instrumentalize radical Shia Islam ideas against Israel and the US. They’ve also been structured to withstand several layers of decapitation, so that they can work in a semi-autonomous structure. This is why Iran attacked Oman, for example. It wasn’t an order from the top.
That said, the military is different from the religious leaders. A very possible scenario would see IRGC military leaders taking power, either as a group like in Egypt, or with one general or faction prevailing after an internal struggle. If they do, however, the policy towards the US and Israel is likely to stay the same. So how are the US and Israel supposed to eliminate (or navigate) the web of clerics and IRGC military members through aerial bombs?!
By weakening these sources of power and empowering others.
If it’s true that the US and Israel are fighting for regime change, they will keep bombing the IRGC, Basij, and police, prioritizing their leaders. This is not something that can be achieved quickly. It will take a very long time, probably weeks or months of bombing.
45% of the Iranian government’s income comes from oil.3 If the US and Israel prevent Iran from selling its oil, its income will dry up, and it won’t be able to pay salaries. My guess is the Iranian regime will prioritize IRGC, Basij, and military salaries, but even then, losing 50% of your income can’t be easy. Unfortunately, this takes some time to bite, as the government will use other resources to pay its forces for as long as possible, and people can sometimes withstand some time without a salary.
That said, in the past, small business owners and professionals have coordinated to strike against the government. They are not organized—the Islamists took care of any leader or organization that could threaten their monopoly on power—but they can coordinate in times of need. If they feel a power vacuum, they might push for regime change.
The vast majority of Iranians are tired of their government.
They are now celebrating the bombings on the streets.
Confirmed popular celebrations of the bombing against the Iranian regime
Iranians know there are alternatives to the government they’ve suffered over the last few decades—especially now with social media access to the lifestyles of modern societies. But the people have already fought in the past, and have been decimated. Most recently, in the Crimson Winter of 2025-2026, tens of thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed.
Not only that: They fear their government, but even more they fear a civil war. Which might come with an internecine fight in the IRGC, or for example with the military. So the people might protest and pressure the government, but they won’t be enough to topple it.
As we discussed, the military is managed independently from the IRGC, precisely to split the power and prevent a coup.
But this protection from the military by distancing it works in everyday situations, not when there’s a power vacuum. The military might see an opportunity to benefit from the situation and fight the IRGC. I’ve already read reports of the military sitting out repression actions against the people.
Less than half of Iran’s population is ethnic Persian!
The strongest minorities are the Azeris and Kurds.
Neighboring Azerbaijan would enjoy seeing its co-ethnics gain more autonomy or even independence from Tehran.
Kurds have carved out autonomous regions in Iraq and Syria, and this would be another opportunity to gain further autonomy or even statehood—something that was promised to them by the US in the Iraq war but couldn’t be fulfilled would be much easier to fulfill here, as it would benefit the US to split Iran up.
Baluchis are a smaller population, but they’re in a much more remote, desertic region, with some on the other side of the border with Afghanistan.
Imagine this then: Hundreds of thousands of armed IRGC, Basij, and military members, trained to operate independently, splintering into factions, with no senior leadership because most of them are dead; Azeris, Kurds, Balochis, Arabs Lurs, Mazanis, Gilak, all clamoring for autonomy and even independence; a faction of the population that hates the regime, others who are pro-democracy groups, anti-Muslims, pro-Zoroastrians, pro-Muslims but anti-regime, pro-Shah; in the middle of an economic crisis, a food crisis, a hyperinflation crisis, a water crisis; all buying the weapons that have suddenly appeared in the black market from looted armories and bases.
And everybody knows this, and everybody knows that everybody knows it. Everybody has seen Syria’s fall into civil war and subsequent destruction. They all fear the putrid smell of the cadavers that pile up in civil wars. Some will try to avoid it, but others will take advantage of it. We’re reaching a point of no return.
The US and Israel won’t be in a position to put boots on the ground because of Iran’s sheer size and geography, but they can still play kingmakers. They can bomb whichever enemy faction is prevailing, or simply decapitate it—basically a continuation of what they’re doing right now, except against whoever emerges as a hostile regime.
This makes them kingmakers, and makes it much less likely that any new regime that emerges picks up the hostility of the Islamic revolution. If the current regime falls, we don’t know what will come after, but we can make a pretty educated guess that it will be nicer to Western powers.
But the cataclysmic changes are not limited to Iran’s borders. The entire world is reorganizing.
The first consequence is oil. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, many oil pumping stations and refineries have been hit in the area, and oil has stopped flowing. This will put pressure across the world too as oil prices increase.
This is not a problem for the US, though, as it produces its own oil.
Saudi Arabia can ramp up supply, and employ an east-west pipeline that should be able to bypass the strait. It won’t be enough to counter the entire drop in supply, but it might end up benefiting Saudi Arabia through higher oil prices.
Meanwhile, the biggest consumer of Iranian oil is China, but it has historically high oil and gas reserves, so it might be able to withstand the war if it’s short enough.
Maybe Iran’s stupidest move in the last few years has been its direct attack on so many Arab neighbors: the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan…
I get it: Maybe a barrage of attacks will teach them a lesson and they’ll withdraw any support to the US. But even if they do that, they will now do everything they can to undermine Iran. A neighbor who can send hundreds of missiles your way is not one you want to see survive. Nearly the entire Arabian Peninsula is now united against Iran.
Which pushes them towards Israel. Jordan, Bahrain, and the UAE were already at peace with it. Why wouldn't others join, especially Saudi Arabia?
The case of Qatar is the most surprising. It has frequently supported Iran over the decades. And yet it received a barrage of attacks from Iran, including striking the biggest natural gas facility in the world. How is it going to remain an ally of the Iranian regime after this?
Arabs will have to choose between an outdated and aggressive Islamic Regime and an Israel (and by extension, the West) that offers might, wealth, and doesn't threaten them with violence as long as they don’t threaten it back. Who are they going to choose?
When Trump was voted in, it seemed like the US would withdraw its help to Ukraine and Russia could prevail. Trump did exactly that, but the EU stepped in and replaced all its support.
Then, Russia lost the client states of Venezuela and Cuba. Musk withdrew the ability of Russia’s forces to use Starlink in the battlefront, and now it might lose Iran’s support, including its Shahed drones.
In the short term, the Iranian situation might benefit Russia through higher oil prices, giving its economy a much needed boost. Unless the US and Saudi Arabia are able to make up for the supply shortage by increasing the oil they’re pumping and sending to the world.
Four years ago, China had collected anti-US friends in Russia, Iran and its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Hamas and the Houthis, Venezuela, Cuba, and a host of satellites considering whether to join them or not. Israel took care of Iran’s acolytes. The US neutralized Venezuela, Cuba is isolated and cut off from oil, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and Iran is at risk of falling. Virtually every friend that China has cultivated over the last few years is crumbling.
Not only that, but China’s standing as a provider of technology and military power is completely exposed. If China won’t come to the rescue of its allies, and its weapons can’t stop the US, who will want to side with them?
Then there’s the oil. Venezuela and Iran together accounted for 17% of China’s oil imports.
This is a bad day for China.
But its leaders are not stupid. It’s not a coincidence that it’s investing heavily in solar panels, batteries, drones, AI, and robots. In a few years, it might have eliminated its dependence on foreign oil the way the US did over a decade ago by investing in its homegrown sources of energy. With AI, drones, robots, and its industrial might, it’s becoming a formidable economic and industrial powerhouse, and normally these are the ones that win wars.
So the US might have won this battle, but it’s far from winning the war.
Trump is rewriting the rules of war, too. Instead of assuming that regime change requires invasions, he succeeded at it in Venezuela with just a strategy of decapitation. Cuba may be the next candidate in line. If the US succeeds in Iran, it will have proven this is a viable geopolitical and military strategy. Even if it doesn’t, leaders from other countries might become more pliable if they know that too much hostility sends them into a coffin.
It’s unclear what will happen in the coming days, but if we dream a bit, what would happen if the regime were replaced by one focused on progress and development without a civil war?
The first few days would be critical. Sanctions would have to be released immediately, foreign assets should be unfrozen, and oil would have to flow again, but this is unlikely to raise money fast enough to secure the transition. Iran would need about $2 billion/month of funding to pay civil servants and military salaries, fund essential services, finance reconstruction, import food and medicine, and stabilize the currency.
If all that is done correctly, Iran has a shot at becoming a success story like South Korea.
Iran has 90M people, nearly twice South Korea’s population. 42% of them are under 25, and they have a 98% literacy rate. The country birthed one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, the first empire, and has seen a succession of successful ones through the ages. Its diaspora in the world—especially in the US—is educated, rich, and powerful. It could fund and provide the leadership for a renaissance in the country.
But only if the current regime falls.
Before turning against the Left and murdering its leaders.
Bonyad-e Mostazafan Enghelab-e Eslami and Astan Quds Razavi
The numbers are not clear, because governments sandbag this type of metric (they don’t want to show too much dependence on oil). Official numbers show ~35%, but with indirect revenues, my guess is the real figure is probably closer to 45%.
2026-02-26 05:09:19
This man has the hardest job in the world:
He has to transition the biggest conservative petrostate in the world into a modern, diversified economy. The odds are stacked impossibly against him. To understand why, and how likely he is to succeed, we need to understand the three words that encapsulate his predicament: Saudi, Arabia, and Oil.
Saudi Arabia is a big country.
It’s big, and it sits in the middle of an otherwise pretty divided region:
Why is the region so divided? Because it’s in the middle of everything.
Virtually everything that moves between Europe, Asia, and Africa moves along the border seas of Arabia, pretty close to the coast because the passages are narrow:
That has been true for millennia.
This means that trading posts appeared along its coasts for millennia, and cosmopolitan kingdoms emerged:
That’s one of the main reasons Saudi Arabia is surrounded by so many smaller countries along the coasts, including Jordan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrein, and Kuwait.
Before Saudi Arabia, the peninsula had only been united for about 200 years, between 650 and 860 AD, through the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid Caliphates. Why not longer?
It’s nearly all desert. Why? Like the Sahara, it’s smack in the middle of the horse latitudes, with dry air coming down from the upper atmosphere preventing humid air from coming in from elsewhere and raining on the region.
Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the world with no rivers! It only has wadis, ephemeral river beds that only occasionally carry water after rain. You can actually tell how dry it is simply by looking at the satellite image—there’s a bit of rocks and water, and the rest is just infinite amounts of sand.
The sand is so sandy that there are dunes up to 250 m high!
Although to my ignorant eye, it all looks like desert, the locals can distinguish the nuances and have different names for each. The three big sand-dune deserts are Nafud, Dahna, and Rub’al Khali (the Empty Quarter in English).
The Empty Quarter is so vast that, to this day, no road crosses it!
Why is the west rockier?
You can see here the relative elevation of the west:
Where does that come from?
The Arabian-Nubian Shield was a big rocky mountain formation that was then split by the Red Sea. Now the mountains remain on both sides of the sea, and the east part (the Arabian Shield) has some pretty tall mountains!
These mountains are so high that sometimes it snows in Yemen, and even in Saudi Arabia!
You can get a sense of the coastal escarpment here.
This coastal range is called the Sarawat Mountains.
Thanks to its altitude, it catches the rainwater coming from Africa and the Red Sea.
Fun fact: It mostly catches water from the African monsoon!
That rain is necessary for the population to grow:
That’s why the historic kingdoms on the west coast, on the Red Sea, were traditionally the more powerful ones: They had the access to trade and they had the population. This is where you find the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, and Taif, and the birth of Islam.
These coastal regions are also the most exposed to foreign powers: Trade moves in very narrow corridors, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, which can be easily controlled through three choke points.
This is why most regional empires controlled only parts of the coasts—especially those of the Red Sea, crucial for Europe-Asian trade—but not the interior:
But the capital of Saudi Arabia is not in this richer, populous region! It’s in Riyadh, nearer the center, in a more desertic region called the Nadj. Why?
The Najd is basically the Arabian Shield outside of the coast.1
Thanks to the mountains, it still catches some rain and humidity. This water follows gravity, so it usually concentrated around wadis—riverbeds that dry up during parts of the year but are generally more humid than the surrounding areas, and can sustain vegetation.
Where water accumulates it can form oases, or if the water table is close to the surface, it can be pumped. This is what formed settlements in the region.
Since water is so precious, these settlements needed protection:
Some of these wadi-fed settlements are cities in Najd today:
You can easily see them in satellite pictures:
And since each wadi is independent from the others, the region ended up with several independent settlements—which, naturally, fought each other for these resources.
Along these wadis, where agriculture couldn’t survive, grazing could, so pastoral societies emerged shepherding goats, sheep, and especially camels.
Pastoralists are very mobile and can carry their wealth with them, so they can easily attack settlements when the need arises. Combine this with independent settlements and scarce water, and you have a recipe for intense tribal warfare.
This is the context in which we should understand the other part of Saudi Arabia—the House of Saud.
The Al Saud family comes from Riyadh and fought other tribes to prevail in the Najd, especially the Rashidi, whose wadi system was on one of the main pilgrimage paths from Mesopotamia to Mecca:
One of the keys to defeating the Rashidi was the Al Saud alliance in 1744 with the Wahhab tribe, promoters of Wahhabism. Their religious zeal brought the Al Saud family the manpower they needed to contest the region, and eventually prevail in the early 1900s after over 150 years of conflict.
We saw how the geography of the Najd gave birth to a certain type of politics. Now imagine the type of religion that can emerge there: One very centered in Arabia, Arabs, and original Muslims, that repudiates anything foreign—as there was virtually no contact with foreigners in the Najd, and when there was, they were Muslim pilgrims. The result is one of the most radically Islamist versions of Islam. To this day, Wahhabis are concentrated in the Najd.
The House of Saud brought the secular force, the Wahhabis brought the religious zeal. This alliance can be seen on the flag of Saudi Arabia:
Green represents Islam. The writing at the top is the Shahada: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” It represents the religious aspect of Saudi Arabia brought by the Wahhabis. The sword represents the secular force, the other tribe that controls power in Saudi Arabia—the Al Saud.
Note that the previous flag of Saudi Arabia was more blatant about the scimitars being the same as those of the Al Saud:
The Wahhabi were among the first to fight foreign empires in Arabia, fighting the Ottomans in the early 1800s. The Rashidis allied with them and used their power to prevail. But then the Al Saud / Wahhabis partnered with the British Empire, and as it overpowered the Ottomans, so did the Al Saud / Wahhabis. This is how the Al Saud/Wahhab alliance took over what would become Saudi Arabia, and that’s why the country is a hyperreligious monarchy to this day: It’s the result of the central Najd religious-inspired fighters taking over the rest of the peninsula from the center, just at the right moment.
Believe it or not, this entire conquest—going from nothing to retaking Riyadh to conquering all of what would become Saudi Arabia—was done under one single Al Saud ruler, Ibn Saud, AKA Abdulaziz. He then proceeded to marry over 20 women—many of them from different Arabian tribes, to cement their alliances—who gave him around 100 children. Today, the family has 15,000 people, of whom 2,000 are close to power.2
Of course, not all of the other families are very happy about this. Most notably, the Hashemites (a family that had ruled over Mecca continuously since the 10th Century) ruled the Kingdom of Hejaz on the west coast when the Al Saud took it. Both families had allied with the Brits during WW1, so after the Al Saud conquered Hejaz, Britain compensated the Hashemites with the kingdoms of Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq. Of those, today they only control Jordan.
In the spirit of “making friends”… you know who the Al Saud have not married into? Many Shia.
Of course, the Wahhabis, as Sunni zealots, don’t tolerate the Shia well. Among other nice things, they attacked and sacked the Shia Mesopotamian city of Karbala in 1802 (Ottoman at the time), killing thousands, including children and women. Unfortunately for the social cohesion of the newly-formed country in the 1930s, some parts of Saudi Arabia are inhabited by Shia Muslims.
As luck would have it, the Shia region on the Persian Gulf coast in the east is where the oil is.
Just as Ibn Saud was unifying Arabia with his family and the Wahhabis, Western companies found oil in Persia (modern-day Iran), and then in Bahrain. The Saudis searched for oil and found it in 1938.
The east coast of Saudi Arabia has the biggest onshore and the biggest offshore oil fields in the world.
This is why Saudi Arabia is the 2nd largest producer of oil in the world and the largest exporter.
But Saudi Arabia makes much more money from its oil than any other country, because its oil is much cheaper to produce.
That’s because Saudi Arabia’s oil is in huge fields, mostly onshore, near the surface, easy to access, a lot of it spurts out of the ground without much effort, and the fields are close to the coast, so it’s cheap to get it there.
As a result, oil represents about 42% of GDP… but 95% of the country’s exports.
Scarily, oil accounts for ~80% of government income!3
It’s so cheap for Saudi Arabia to pump this oil that it has built a lot of spare capacity. This is a tremendous geopolitical asset, because it can threaten other oil-producing countries with crashing oil prices by dumping millions of additional barrels of oil per day. This leverage frequently pushes them to reduce their own production to keep prices up.
How does Saudi Arabia use this oil?
Saudi Arabia spends on its military a bigger share of its income than the US. It spends more than Russia!
How come?!
Part of it is in the alliance with the US: The deal is that the US gets Saudi oil in exchange for protection, but that oil is not free, and neither is the protection. Saudi Arabia needs to pay for it.
Part of it is because the government has no legitimacy beyond that of the sword and religious radicalism, so it must make sure people are not scheming against it. This requires a big security apparatus. That’s the stick.
The carrot is to have plenty of government jobs in the military, as well as procurement budgets that can benefit important families.
But the most important factor is geopolitics, going back to this map:
The main opponent is Iran:
It’s right next to Saudi Arabia (SA), about 150 km (~100 mi) away
Iran is Shia, SA is Sunni.
Yet Iran has Sunni populations and SA has Shia populations, both of which can be propped up by the opponent as internal enemies.
Iran is an Islamic republic that took down its monarchy to replace it. Since then, it’s been trying to take down monarchies across the Muslim world, and the biggest one is Saudi Arabia’s.
Both are the big regional players, so both vie for influence.
Iran as a rule of thumb is pretty hostile and violent to its enemies.
Iran has directly attacked SA in the past: It destroyed Saudi refineries with drones in 2019.
That threat has been multiplying. Iran has taken indirect control of Iraq, which has a huge border with SA that is hard to defend, as it’s in the middle of the desert.
And of course, Iran backs the Houthis—Shias in Yemen—in their civil war against the Sunnis. That war is on the border with Saudi Arabia, and SA has some Shia in that region.
Iran is the biggest threat, but it’s not the only one. Until a century ago, large parts of Arabia were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and the Turks still eye the region as they build back their strength. Both compete for the global Sunni leadership. Turkey has supported the Muslim Brotherhood while the Saudis condemn the group—and even facilitated a coup in Egypt to oust them.
Jordan and Saudi Arabia have a cordial relationship, but Jordan is still ruled by the Hashemite family, who have a strong claim to the throne of western Arabia, Hejaz. If Saudi Arabia were to weaken, and the Hashemites saw an opening to retake Hejaz, wouldn’t they take it?
Finally, we still have the issue that all the trading lanes around Saudi Arabia are narrow and have choke points. If Saudi Arabia loses them—as it has partially with the Red Sea near Bab El-Mandem with the Houthis—its entire budget is at risk. They are one blockade away from financial ruin.
This is why Saudi Arabia had to be so close with the US, and why they signed an alliance of oil-for-protection around the end of WW2. But that’s not the only balancing act that Saudi Arabia needs to maintain. It also needs to keep oil prices up, which is why it was a founding member of OPEC and raised oil prices against the US. It’s why, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it agreed with Russia (2nd largest exporter of oil in the world) to reduce their oil output to keep prices up. It’s why it must keep China happy, as the main customer for Saudi oil. These very interests are why the US decided to invest so heavily in its own oil, and why it has become the world’s #1 producer. Thanks to that, and the rise of solar and batteries, the US’s interest in the region will continue waning. Saudi Arabia knows this. And it’s not prepared for a crash in oil demand.
Saudi Arabia has 260k military personnel and spends over $60B on military gear every year, but even with the help of the other half of Yemen, it hasn’t been able to beat the Houthis.4 So the Saudi military is not that good.
This is by design. Maintaining any military force poses the risk that it will topple the government and take power, as happened in Egypt. It’s especially true in Saudi Arabia, where the government has no more legitimacy than having taken power by force. So the Al Saud systematically undermine the power of the military.
Half of the Saudi force is in the National Guard, the personal protection force of the Al Saud! The remaining forces are split between the Armed Forces, the Border Guard, the Royal Guard, and state security and intelligence services, all of which report to different princes. Personnel is recruited and promoted based on allegiance, not ability.
Notice what’s at the heart of the emblem of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces? That ain’t the Saudi Arabia flag…
But the military is not the only dubious beneficiary of oil money.
Saudis make more money than Canadians5 but read worse than the Gabonese.
A big chunk of that money comes from oil, as 50% of Saudi nationals are employed in the public sector.6 The OECD average is 18% and the highest in the OECD, the petrostate of Norway, only employs 30% of the country’s workers… Saudis working in the public sector make 30-50% more than their counterparts in the private sector, so these jobs are more prized—not even accounting for all the job benefits they get in the public sector.
The result is that 40%–50% of government spending is in wages, compared to 8% in the US, 18% in bloated France, and 15% in Norway!
Wages are not the only way Saudis are supported by the state. For example, Saudi Arabia provides huge fuel subsidies to its citizens:
$7k in subsidies per person for a family of four, that’s $28k per year…
In other words, Saudi Arabia is burning a huge share of its revenue in subsidizing its population, either directly, or indirectly via unproductive public jobs.
All this work performed by millions of people… You can’t tax that. You’re using your government revenue to pay for them! How is Saudi Arabia supposed to maintain this level of spending if oil revenue drops?
Of course, that’s not the only way Saudi Arabia has been wasting its oil money. In the country, rivers of oil have become rivers of water, as it has developed the world’s highest capacity for water desalination:7 60% of the water the country consumes is desalinated! Of course, the energy for this desalination comes from oil, so oil is subsidizing the country’s water. Until recently, a sizable amount of this water was dedicated to agriculture—literally watering the desert!
Apparently, another 30% of water consumption in the country is from non-renewable groundwater, so 90% of the country’s water is basically at risk, as oil revenue shrinks.8
In Homer’s Odyssey, as Odysseus crosses the Strait of Messina, he must decide which monster his ship will pass closer to: the six-headed Scylla or the whirlpool formed by Charybdis. He won’t be able to avoid danger and loss.
As I think about Mohammed bin Salman’s predicament, I can’t help but think he’s in a similar position, but in the sand—like in Dune, between a sandworm and quicksand:
The foundation of the Al Saud reign is force, underpinned by oil—but oil is waning.
Their power comes from the central Najd, which is culturally and religiously very local and conservative. But the peripheries of Saudi Arabia have a very different history and culture.
Hejaz, to the west, is traditionally much more cosmopolitan, centered on the Red Sea and its trade. It was a kingdom until very recently, and the previous ruling family still reigns in Jordan.
To the east, the population is majority Shia, at odds with the Wahhabi religious interpretation.
Iran, the regional Shia power, is extremely at odds with Saudi Arabia, as Iran replaced its Western-allied king with an Islamist republic, and it hopes to do the same in Saudi Arabia.
Iraq is now aligned with Iran, creating a huge pro-Shia border with Saudi Arabia.
The biggest protector, the US, is losing interest in Saudi Arabia as its own oil production increases and the surge of renewables and batteries limits the importance of oil.
Meanwhile, the other regional hegemon, Turkey, is becoming increasingly assertive.
The Saudis can barely trust their own military to fend off these threats, as the ruling family’s legitimacy is based only on strength and oil. If one goes, the other goes with it, and a coup is likely.
That is, if there isn’t an internal coup first within the Al Saud family—entirely possible since there are 15,000 of them.
As oil income continues shrinking, the Saudis will also have to diversify the economy from oil pretty dramatically.
This is difficult, as the entire economy revolves around oil, from the massive number of civil servants to water, agriculture, and energy subsidies.
A key to achieving this economic turnaround is to thrust Saudi Arabia into the future, but how can you do that when its culture is anchored in Wahhabism? The very modernization it needs economically is radically at odds with its traditional religion, going back over 250 years to the first alliance of the Al Saud with the Wahhabs.
If MbS succeeds, the transformation might be as impressive as the one carried out by a trader in the region 1,400 years ago. But will he? In the next (premium) article on Saudi Arabia, we will explore what he has tried, how it has gone so far, how likely he is to succeed, and how that helps understand the recent changes in policies in the kingdom. Subscribe to read it!
Every map draws it differently, so I had to pick what I thought made the most sense, and my guess is the Najd is defined by the Arabian Shield outside of the coast, because:
Outside of the shield there’s too much sand, and you can’t build anything on sand.
On the coast you had populations more centered on the sea, which also means they’re more cosmopolitan and focused on trade.
This is a claim from Wikipedia. I assumed that meant all the Al Saud from forever, but ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok all suggest the vast majority are direct descendants of Ibn Saud! Assuming every generation takes on average 30 years, and that Ibn Saud’s children were born on average in 1930, by 1960 he had a 2nd generation on average, by 1990 a third, and by 2020 a fourth. The first generation (Ibn’s children) were apparently ~100, and at least one of them had ~100 children, which is how you can get to 10,000 descendants within two generations, and after four, you’d reach 10M. In reality, daughters can’t marry so many men and have so many children, so if you only consider the patrilineal sides, Ibn Saud had 36 sons that survived to adulthood. Four generations like that gets you 1.7M male descendants. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that most of the 15,000 Al Saud are direct descendants, although some also likely come from “cadet lines”, or branches other than Ibn Saud’s direct line.
The figure is actually hard to get, I assume because of course the government wants to sandbag it. Official figures suggest ~60% of income from oil, but they’re breaking down the oil revenue into straight income, royalties, taxes, dividends… Many of which really come from oil. Some of the income comes via the sovereign fund, the PIF, which owns part of the state oil company, Saudi Aramco. But the fact that it comes from PIF and not Saudi Aramco directly doesn’t matter. There’s also the indirect revenue: About ⅔ of Saudis work in the public sector (paid through money coming from oil!). They pay their taxes on goods and services, which apparently are 50% of non-oil taxes. But that money comes mostly from oil, via the salaries of the public servants! That’s ~17% more government income directly attributable to oil. This is why Wikipedia quotes ~75% as the figure. My guess is the true revenue is probably higher than 80%, but my point here is not to be precise, it’s to convey the idea that the government is terribly dependent on oil, and this is enough for that.
The Houthis now have 200,000 military personnel, but there are also hundreds of thousands of Sunni Yemeni soldiers.
GDP per capita in PPP is a better measure than GDP per capita, but is not perfect here, as Saudi Arabia is much more unequal than Canada. But I couldn’t find a measure of median representative income that exists for both the West and Saudi Arabia. GNI per capita shows something similar. A better measure is median household income, but we need to collate different sources for this. The OECD says Canada’s is $40k, while Saudi Arabia’s government says the equivalent number for Saudi families (not those of foreigners) is $44k. So yes, the average Saudi has more money than the average Canadian!
It claims 7.5M m3, and from my calculations the 2nd largest is the UAE, which has about 7M m3.
Saudi Arabia will always be able to pump its oil to burn it for cheap electricity for desalination, though. It might just be fiscally harder without income from the share of the oil it sells.
2026-02-18 19:25:00
This is the only article of the week. The 2nd half is premium.
Elon Musk is betting his companies SpaceX and xAI on space datacenters.
He believes that, in three years’ time, AI companies won’t have access to enough electricity to power their data centers, so only those who move the data centers to space will be able to continue growing their AIs.
The question becomes: Can you build working datacenters in space at a reasonable price?
As I ran the numbers, I realized that Musk is on to something: Datacenters in space are already in the ballpark of costs of land-based ones, and might soon be cheaper! This article will explain why.
In the process of writing it, I studied dozens of sources, including many space datacenter reports. I also wrote a tweet to gather feedback from the community—which Musk responded to. That said, as it’s my first foray into space datacenters, I’m still guaranteed to have made mistakes; I just don’t know which ones. However, it doesn’t look like they would change the conclusions. Please point out mistakes if you find them.
At its core, a datacenter on land is pretty simple:
The GPUs1
Some other IT stuff, like memory, radiators to cool the system, connectors, etc.
A source of electricity. If you want your data center to be independent from the grid, you’ll want:
Solar panels to convert light into electricity
Batteries to store the excess electricity from the solar panels during the day and power the datacenters at night
If you want to put this in space, you need to fit that stuff into a rocket.
But that’s a lot of stuff, especially the three bulkiest elements: solar panels, batteries, and radiators. SpaceX is building Starship, a rocket that can carry 150-200 tons to space at a cost that should reach ~$100/kg. That’s ~15x cheaper than what they can do today (and 45x cheaper than the competition), but it’s still quite expensive. So you want to strip as much of that weight as you can. How do you do that?
Solar panels produce about 25% of the electricity they could theoretically generate because of the day-night cycle, the seasons, and atmospheric conditions like clouds or storms. But in space, the Sun is always shining. If you have the right orbit, you can keep your solar panels lit all the time, and that provides two benefits.
First, you get ~4x more direct sunlight, because the Sun will be perpendicular to the panels all the time, and there will be no night.
Second, when solar rays cross the atmosphere, they lose about ~30% of their energy.2 Eliminate the atmosphere, and you eliminate this loss.
Add these factors together, and you get ~5x (and up to 9x) more energy from your solar panels than you would on Earth—or, in other words, you need 5x fewer solar panels (and their mass) in space than on Earth.3
If your solar panels are perfectly illuminated, you don’t need to buy and transport the very heavy batteries, which represent over half4 of the total weight. Massive win.
But how do you get your solar panels to always face the Sun?
One way to achieve that is by orbiting the Earth around the poles, in what’s called a sun-synchronous orbit:
The problem with this is that it’s quite expensive to get satellites into these orbits. Normally, rockets are launched from as close to the equator as possible, in order to use the rotation of the Earth to move faster.
But if you send them into a polar orbit, you can’t use that inertia, so it’s much less fuel-efficient. It’s easier if your satellite follows an orbit that isn’t too distant from the equator’s plane.
The problem here is that the satellite ends up in the shadow of the Earth… Another solution is to send the satellite far enough from Earth,5 and not quite on the same plane as the equator, so that it won’t pass through the Earth’s shadow.
The exact orbit will need to optimize for:
100% sunlight
Closest proximity to Earth (to reduce fuel costs of the rocket to reach a distant orbit)
Efficiency for rockets from Starbase to reach
But if the satellites are far from Earth, isn’t this going to create some latency? Won’t signal take too long to come back to Earth? Yes, but it doesn’t matter:
Even if the satellites were far away, say at 5,000 km, the time for the signal to go back and forth from Earth would be 30 ms.
For most AI uses, a few milliseconds (or even seconds) of delay doesn’t matter that much. Think about how long some AI tasks take today, from seconds to minutes, and even hours!6
OK we got rid of more than half of the weight from batteries and 5xed the efficiency of our solar panels. What else can we eliminate?
Once you’ve disposed of the batteries, the solar array is the biggest source of weight of Starlink satellites today,7 about a third of the total.
But in space, solar panels are much lighter than on Earth. A solar panel on Earth weighs8 about 10 kg/m2 or more9, while in space it can weigh as little as 1 kg/m2 or less.
That’s because, in space, there’s no gravity, atmosphere, rain, hail, dust… The panels only need to be lightly structured; they don’t need glass to protect them, aluminum frames, stiff backsheets, sturdy mounting, rails, clamps, grounding…
They do need some coating to protect against the intense solar radiation and flares, but if the satellites are close enough to Earth, they’re protected by its magnetic field, so with minimal coating, they can withstand failure rates of less than 1% per year.
Musk’s SpaceX (and Tesla!) design and participate in the supply chain of solar panels, so I assume they’ll adapt them as much as possible to their needs.
This is already quite optimized, though, so I assume there’s not too much more to do here.
Now we need to optimize the weight of GPUs, but these are actually not very heavy relative to their cost. To get a sense of this, an NVIDIA GPU today costs ~$25k and weighs from 1.2 – 2 kg, while a fully-loaded system (if you add all the other costs, like memory, cooling, etc) costs as much as $56k and weighs 16 kg.
Sending 16 kg to space today is expensive ($24k), but it won’t be with Starship ($3.2k when it costs $200/kg, half that when it costs $100/kg). And that assumes all the weight of what we use on Earth would be carried to space, which is unlikely. These systems will be streamlined for weight, so that the cost of shipping the GPUs to orbit will be a tiny fraction of the cost of the GPUs. We’ll see in a moment why.
But besides their weight, GPUs face another problem in space: radiation. On Earth, we’re protected from solar electromagnetic rays by the atmosphere and our magnetic field, but these protections are much weaker in space—when they exist. This is a serious problem for computers in space today, because these rays cause mayhem in computers. As a result, they need shielding, which is expensive and heavy.
One of the issues is that electromagnetic rays flip bits and cause havoc in existing systems. For example, imagine that a computer has the following number: 1000001000001, which in decimal is 4161. If that first bit receives a solar ray and flips to 0, that number is now 0000001000001, which in decimal is 65. Imagine that you’re calculating 4161*10 and instead of getting 41,610, you get 650. Every downstream calculation will be monumentally off. Catastrophe! As a result, computers in space today require electromagnetic shields that add to their weight.
But this is not how AI works. AIs are not deterministic, they’re probabilistic. AIs have massive files with billions of parameters that each add a tiny amount to the final value. Querying a GPU is kind of like taking a poll to millions of people. Another way to think about it: In your brain, connections between neurons are constantly dying and forming. Any single one of them is not important at all. They can be severed, and everything will continue as normal.
The result is that GPUs don’t need as much electromagnetic shields as traditional computers, so this added weight can be avoided.
The rest of the software can also be adapted to this situation, tolerating random errors instead of assuming perfect calculations all the time.
Some systems, like the memory, will still need shielding, but if you’re limiting the shielding to only a few small parts of the satellite, the cost in weight will be tiny.
With this type of treatment, Google believes their chips can last 5 years in space—about the lifetime of a datacenter:10
We tested Trillium, Google’s TPU, in a proton beam to test for impact from total ionizing dose (TID) and single event effects (SEEs).
The results were promising. While the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) subsystems were the most sensitive component, they only began showing irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2,000 rad(Si) — nearly three times the expected (shielded) five year mission dose of 750 rad(Si). No hard failures were attributable to TID up to the maximum tested dose of 15 krad(Si) on a single chip, indicating that Trillium TPUs are surprisingly radiation-hard for space applications.—Google
GPUs have a high failure rate, but you can’t swap them in space. So what are you supposed to do?
One of the measures will be to make them more tolerant to heat (we’ll talk about this next). This should reduce failure rates, especially in space.
But aside from that, most failures happen at the beginning of a GPU’s life, so if you test the GPUs on land first, you should be able to reduce the failure rate dramatically, so that your average GPUs lasts ~5 years.
And now we get to radiators.
Before I started this article, this was my main concern. Radiators on Earth are very heavy, because you have the radiator, the fans, the cooling liquids… And in space, it’s even worse, because you can’t use the environment to cool off your machines! So I expected these systems to be huge, cumbersome, and prohibitively heavy.
But here’s the insight that blew my mind: Just using the front and back of the solar panels as radiators is enough to cool off the entire system! How is that possible? Here is the breakdown.
There are three ways of cooling something:
Conduction: Heat is transferred through a material, from a hot point to a cooler one. But in space your satellites are not connected to anything, so they can’t dissipate any heat out this way.
Convection: That’s like wind or water in contact with your surface, extracting heat from it. Same issue as before, there’s no wind or water in space.
Radiation: Like the heat from a lightbulb, a toaster, or the Sun: When something is hot, it radiates heat out. This is the only method you can use in space.
But it turns out that radiation is extremely powerful, because it transfers heat to the 4th power of temperature: T4!
The actual formula is ε*σ*A*T4, but it’s pretty simple. The first variable (ε) is how good your surface is at emitting heat. A good radiator will be close to 1. The second (σ) is just a constant. The third (A) is the area, but we’re going to look at this per square meter of solar panels, so it’s 1, too. The last item, Temperature, is the one that matters. For a given area that is efficient at emitting heat, it’s the only component that has a massive impact.
To give you a sense of how powerful this is, if you move from emitting radiation from 20ºC to 100ºC (68ºF to 212ºF), the heat emitted through radiation is going to increase by 2.6x.11
Why is it raised to the power of four? It was never explained to me in engineering school, but according to ChatGPT, it’s because the energy of the photons being emitted grows in proportion to the temperature (one T), and these photons are emitted throughout all three dimensions (three more Ts), for a total of four Ts.
Anyway, the point is that you can emit a lot of energy through radiation, and your solar panels are enough to cool the entire thing.
The way the datacenters work is that the solar panels get the energy from the Sun—about 1,361 W/m2. They reflect a bit less than 10% of that, so let’s say they absorb 1,225 W/m2. They convert about 20% into electricity (so ~272 W/m2) and the rest becomes heat. The electricity is sent to the GPUs, and in the process, that electricity becomes heat, too. The heat of the solar panels and GPUs must then be dissipated through radiators.
For the system to maintain a certain temperature, it must lose as much energy as it takes in, so the 1,225 Watts it absorbs per square meter must be radiated out. This happens through both the front and the back surface of the solar panels. So you have:12
That gives you T=60ºC (334 K, 140ºF)! Now this is a bit idealized. In reality, the satellites will also receive heat from the Earth, so they’ll be a bit hotter. But there are ways to minimize that heat:
More importantly, GPUs are normally cooled with heavy radiators and liquids, which xAI and SpaceX want to avoid, so they won’t perfectly dissipate their heat and will run at a higher temperature than on Earth (or the solar panels in space). Musk believes they should run at 97ºC (207ºF). For comparison, GPUs normally run at ~80°C, with a max around 88 – 93°C, but they can tolerate ~90-105°C in datacenters, so this is not too far off. Industrial- and military-grade silicon commonly stands up to ~125°C. The GPUs just need to be optimized to run at a slightly higher temperature than they’re used to on Earth.
This is another reason why it’s so important that SpaceX and xAI have merged: xAI is designing its own chips and will now start adapting them to this type of requirements.
The heat generated by the GPUs must be transferred out. It’s unclear whether this will be through radiators on the GPUs themselves, or by conducting heat back to the solar panels to be dissipated there. In any case, there will be some mass associated to that, but it doesn’t look like it will be too much
The bus is the thing that usually carries all the stuff a satellite actually wants in space.
In Starlink, they include the thrusters and communication devices like antennas and thrusters to maneuver. The datacenters would still need the thrusters, but the need for communication devices would be tiny. I’m not sure whether the GPUs would be lodged there or more distributed behind the solar panels for heat dissipation.
OK, so now we have a broad sense of what these space datacenters should look like:
Lightweight solar panels to gather electricity
Use their front and back for cooling
Add the GPUs and other computing systems, including the bus. Some of these parts will be shielded from solar radiation, others won’t
The system should run below 100ºC
That’s it! No radiators, no more heavy equipment!
Is this going to be cheaper than building datacenters on Earth? To answer that, let’s see what a real one would look like, and compare it to one on Earth.
