Just how how did the products of a suite of defense tech companies named after Tolkien characters come to vie for control of Eurasia?
On the third day of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Tehran, something novel in the annals of warfare happened. Iranian rockets struck Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. They had already struck the Gav-Yam Technology Park in Israel, housing the Israeli army’s C4I communications headquarters, in June 2025.
There was nothing random about targeting these apparently non-military facilities. Sprawling, energy-intensive data centers have become the logistical juice lines so critical to the conduct of modern warfare. They form an invisible infrastructure that armies require for an artificial intelligence-enhanced battlefield edge that provides their living soldiers or autonomous killer robots with target lists at machine speed through processing enormous amounts of surveillance data, culled from sensor arrays.
“Iran striking the Amazon data centers shows the modern face of war,” argues Anthony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. “They know that without those data centers Israel and the U.S. are pretty blind.”
In a war whose first week resembled a chess game between engineers applying mathematical models, Iranian missiles also struck Fujeira in the United Arab Emirates and Salalah and Duqm in Oman, the only ports beyond the straits of Hormuz with an oil-exporting capacity. Oil promptly registered its single largest one-week price spike in history. But the greatest setback was prompted by the bombing of powerful U.S. AN/TPY-2 and FPS-132 radars in the Emirates, Kuwait, and Jordan. This inconceivable blow largely blinded the Americans and Israelis over Iranian missile launches, reduced incoming missile alerts from fifteen minutes to five, and even restricted their fighter jets’ ability to accurately bomb Iran from beyond the range of its air defenses.
This is the first three-way war in human history where every participant uses AI.
“The targeting logic Iran applied here is the most technically sophisticated strike of the war,” said Shanaka Perera, a Sri Lankan analyst and author of The Ascent Begins: The World Beyond Empire. “The focus has been on the interceptor count, launch rates, and salvo volumes, but Iran focused on the sensor architecture. So if the interceptor is the fist, then the radar is the eye; and they blinded that eye.”
The radar and data center strikes took out two essential components in the chain facilitating AI-enabled warfare. The radars are among thousands of ground, air, and space-based sensors feeding the algorithm the information it needs to select targets. The data centers provide the petabytes of storage necessary to absorb the colossal volumes of data and high-definition video required for this new kind of warfare.
These and other hits were almost certainly engineered by artificial intelligence algorithms adopted by the Iranian army during its years of preparation for an attack by the U.S. and Israel, making this the first three-way war in human history where every participant uses AI. The technology’s novelty can prompt horrific mistakes, claims Iranian analyst Trita Parsi, such as the bombing of the completely civilian Police Park in Tehran, simply because no human bothered to determine what an AI-proposed targeting suggestion was.
“One week in, the fighting has centered on aerial and missile exchanges, cyber disruptions, and AI-driven targeting, with minimal ground involvement so far,” said Omid Souresrafil, an Iranian analyst and author of Revolution in Iran: The Transition to Democracy. “This engineer-centric war leverages AI for rapid targeting and simulations, compressing decision-making cycles from weeks to hours.”
Unwilling to commit soldiers to an invasion of Iran’s impenetrable geophysical features, the U.S. and Israel have also failed to incite the ethnic and social groups within Iran into an uprising. This has only augmented AI’s role in the ongoing conflict. But as military targets segued into civilian ones, and the Israeli-American joint force bombed Iranian hospitals, schools, and refineries, it became clear that AI’s superhuman targeting ability replaces gradualism with an uncontrollable climactic spiral.
“Three nations are building three separate AI kill chains in real time, each shaped by its own constraints, and none of them fully control what they have built,” said Perera, who believes that Israeli targeting systems developed for Gaza are being enabled by Claude, an LLM (Large Language Model) developed by the U.S. company Anthropic, whose Pentagon contract was controversially rescinded on the eve of the war because its company insisted that a human always be involved in target execution. Perera explained, “America compresses the kill chain from days to hours; Iran compresses the cost of attack below the cost of defense; China compresses the information advantage that made American power projection possible since 1945.”
What Shanaka Perera is referencing are the different ways in which each state has shaped AI usage to its own military’s priorities and capacities. Overwhelming U.S. firepower dictates that American AI systems produce a multitude of targets that can deliver stunning initial shock doctrines while accelerating the pace of battle. By contrast, Iran’s ambition to extend the conflict into a protracted war of attrition prioritizes target selections that reduce the power imbalance with its foes by forcing them into battlespace cost inequalities. China, which is widely believed to be offering Iran background support, is further reducing the U.S.’s overwhelming advantage in space by publishing satellite intelligence on the internet to which Iran otherwise would not have access.
“There are two thresholds to the technofeudal war machine,” said Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and author of an upcoming book titled War and Peace in the Technofeudal Age. “The sheer volume of targets selected and destroyed means that any human involvement is delegated to some lowly officer who suddenly acquires discretionary powers even the president never had; but also that to work, drones and robots need to be cut loose from human operators and become autonomous as the other side becomes increasingly adept at jamming the radio link between them.”
So how did we arrive at an apparently doomsday scenario whereby two nuclear-armed powers and a nuclear-aspirant one deploy artificial intelligence to slug it out in the world’s energy center? And how did it all start in the world’s digital tech capital, Silicon Valley?
Reagan-era beginnings and the post-9/11 AI boom
Korean American film student Koohan Paik-Mander got a front-row seat to the first stirrings of Silicon Valley in 1986, during a heady, drug-fueled period she describes as an “oddly amoral time of my youth.” She was married to an early AI developer working on missile defense research at Carnegie Mellon University for U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense, commonly dubbed Star Wars. When she first met her husband-to-be, a self-portrait she saw in his Malibu house caught her eye. It depicted a stream of color shooting out of the top of his head, “like a rainbow fountain arcing into a small rectangle floating in space.” When asked about it, he explained that it was a depiction of him “downloading my brain onto a chip.” It may be the first recorded example of a close encounter of the transhumanist kind.
Already in the 1980s, the developer was regaling Paik-Mander with tales of a future that he considered tangible but which seemed impossibly sci-fi to her. He described situations of remote collaboration that, 35 years later, we recognize as the Metaverse. But his charm soon wore off as Paik-Mander discovered an amoralism in how he approached his work on national security-related projects that are the precursors, she says, of today’s “globally-networked, cloud-based command and control center, overseen by the Space Force and built jointly by Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.” Over the years, Paik-Mander became aware that the first stirrings of what she had witnessed would “enable the ability to summon unmanned military forces to rain terror down on any spot in the world – a swarm of drones, hypersonic missiles, submarine torpedoes, and bombers – all with the ease of calling an Uber.”
AI first emerged out of the Star Wars era: Reagan’s Cold War swan song to develop a system of missile interception requiring faster-than-human reaction speeds. Massive state funding boosted research and the technology entered the 1990s with the rise of the “intelligent agent,” improvements in speech recognition, the dawn of Big Data, reinforcement learning, and neural networks. The year 1997 marked an important milestone when IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov. But it was not until the September 11 attacks, as the security state sought to centralize all information in real time and connect the dots between potential threats, that AI development received renewed, massive government funding. The emergence of lethal drones around the same time (the CIA carried out the first drone-borne assassination in Yemen in 2002) set the scene for AI to fuse with autonomous vehicles, culminating in the infamous “signature strikes,” whereby innocents in countries targeted in the War on Terror were executed for engaging in behavior deemed “irregular” by AI software.
Out of this new need came the controversial 2002 Total Information Awareness (TIA) project. It aimed at creating a centralized system that could sift through vast digital archives: whether financial transactions, travel and medical records, educational data, or social networks.
“That’s why AI was invented, because there’s too much data out there for humans to sift through,” Paik-Mander told The Markaz Review. “The Internet is the most comprehensive surveillance system in history.”
“The East Germans and the Stasi could only have dreamed of the kind of abilities of mass surveillance that now exist,” Antony Loewenstein said in an interview with The Markaz Review. “One of the deeply concerning things about this tech is that there’s no transparency about how it is being used and, without any kind of regulation, what’s being deployed now against Iranians and Palestinians will not stay overseas but inevitably come home.”
Public outcry over TIA’s invasiveness resulted in Congress shutting down the project in 2003. Although privacy and human rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief, a decade later whistleblower Edward Snowden would reveal that the research had only gone undercover to the private sector and the NSA. One of its main architects was a man named Peter Thiel.
Thiel, Palantir, and Anduril
Thiel is a billionaire tech financier who made his fortune somewhere between the national security state and a Silicon Valley that had dropped its pretext of morality. The son of a Nazi officer, he grew up in Swakopmund, a Namibian port in German Africa to which ex-Nazis flocked after World War Two. It was a small town where people would greet each other in the street with Sieg Heils and the Nazi flag fluttered from the tallest building, in celebration of Hitler’s birthday, as late as 1989. Thiel’s father ran a nearby uranium mine related to apartheid South Africa’s nuclear program till 1977, when the family moved to the U.S.
At Stanford University, Thiel developed a “deviant philosophy” focused on technological salvationism at the expense of popular democracy. He met Alex Karp, a hyper-energetic fellow student, with whom he went on to build Palantir, the world’s largest AI-enabled surveillance company.
“Thiel’s concept of ‘AI-enabled massive acceleration’ is a hyper-optimistic vision of what will counter the ‘Great Stagnation,’” Varoufakis told The Markaz Review. “His point is that, for decades, progress in the physical world — in areas like air transport, energy, and medicine — has stalled, and AI is what will help restart it and vault humanity into a new era of transformative growth.”
Nor is Thiel shy about expressing elitist viewpoints. In one article, he proposed the replacement of “the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots,” with “Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”
Otherwise known as “Five Eyes,” Echelon is a worldwide surveillance network comprising the five Anglosaxon nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.
His creation of Palantir, a company that “defends the West” through surveillance software-enabled AI warfare, appears to be the consummation of this thought. Funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm, Palantir’s first six years were absorbed in working exclusively for the CIA. It then moved on to offering other government departments and a mostly foreign state clientele a menu of AI-enabled based battlefield advantages, including the ability to track targets and integrate them into what CEO Alex Karp calls the “digital kill-chain.” Today, Palantir’s half-trillion dollar capitalization makes it the world’s largest surveillance company.
“They are the AI arms dealer of the 21st century,” says Jacob Helberg, a national-security expert who serves as an outside policy adviser to Karp.
Named after the palantir “seeing-stones” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the company branded itself as the purveyor of an all-seeing, analytical tool for datasets too large for human analysts to sift through. Thiel went on to fund the creation of a number of other companies with Tolkien-derived names, such as Mithril, Valar, Erebor, Rivendell, and Athelas. The most prominent is Anduril, a new breed of defense hardware companies run like tech startups that challenge traditional defence heavyweights like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin for government business.
Anduril is run by a Hawaiian-shirted, flipflop-wearing Californian named Palmer Luckey, who invented the Oculus VR helmet when he was 19. Despite his apolitical appearance, Luckey declares himself both patriotic and a “radical Zionist.” His Roadrunner drone interceptors and Lattice AI software are being considered as potential counters to the saturating waves of Iran’s low-cost missiles and drones.
Luckey, whose love of controversy led him to quip “I love killer robots,” also stands out for believing that guardrails between autonomous drones and human operators should be removed. “If you really say that robots shouldn’t be able to decide which target to strike, that means that to stop you all somebody has to do is jam your signal,” he said in an interview with Bari Weiss. “I don’t really want the balance of power in the entire world to be decided by who has better RF frequency radio engineers. That’s why you need autonomy.”
Examples of the maximalist advantage bestowed on the U.S. and Israeli armies by this tech are increasingly on show, despite the top-secret nature of much of the technology. Members of the Delta Force team that detained Nicolás Maduro allegedly wore Augmented Reality-enabled visors that integrated night vision and heat signatures, and allowed them to work as a hive-mind, monitoring people hiding behind obstacles and surveying the battlespace from the perspective of overflying drones. In South Lebanon, Israel has 3D-mapped every last building, tree, and elevation using Lidar technology, enabling AI algorithms to identify underground tunnels and hostile activity. In Ukraine, Palantir scans the battlefield through satellites, drones, and thermal sensors, digitally tracing ordnance curvatures and allowing soldiers to instantly target the source of firing. Target-selection programs called Lavender and Maven have maximized the death-count in Gaza, Yemen, and Iran.
Luckey’s pro-Israel stance is typical of a tech culture where contracts and collaborations with the Israeli state and high-tech industry are normalized. Silicon Valley has received an influx of some 1,500 Israeli workers, many of whom are former members of Israeli military technology units 81 and 8200. Paik-Mander finds Silicon Valley’s pro-Zionist turn problematic, because “those who control this technology control the world.”
“AI is a force multiplier,” Paik-Mander argues. She is writing a book titled Digitizing the Sacred: How Silicon Valley Weaponizes Existence. “Silicon Valley and Israel are now merged, largely thanks to [Jeffrey] Epstein, who got Palantir to open an office in Israel. The result is accelerated momentum toward an Israeli/U.S. war on Iran.”
The relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus started flowering around the time that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein introduced Ehud Barak to Peter Thiel in 2014. Epstein later pitched Barak’s company to Thiel’s venture capital fund which eventually invested in it, before it was sold to Axon, a taser and body-camera manufacturer, that is majority-owned by Vanguard and Blackrock. Epstein was also instrumental in founding Israel’s tech collaboration with the UAE, by introducing Barak to his friend, the now-resigned Dubai Ports World director, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem. Sulayem invested in Barak’s company, several years before the Abraham Accords’ trade normalization resulted in intense UAE-Israel security collaborations on a multinational security system, a joint intelligence platform, and technology transfers.
Paik-Mander continues watching the development of Silicon Valley and the tech age from her perch in Hawaii. She fears that AI-enabled cognitive warfare is realizing an agenda of endless war. “If you can eliminate soldiers, you can feasibly achieve endless war, which means endless profits,” she said, recalling Julian Assange’s remark that the Afghanistan war was about leeching funds from the U.S. tax-base and laundering them into profits for the military-industrial complex.
“Data is the new oil and AI is ‘the oil refinery,’” she told The Markaz Review. “A push is on to continually extract our data during every moment of our existence. AI is meaningless without the data. As long as the data flows, active surveillance grows exponentially.”
As if to confirm her appraisal, this week Iran moved from presiding over a blocked Straits of Hormuz and rocket-struck oil tankers to threatening to strike U.S. companies servicing the U.S. military, naming Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle as their next targets.
