When your infrastructure became sovereign
The assumption that died
For half a century, strategy assumed a world flat enough to be navigable. Supply chains spanned continents as if they were streets on the same map. Capital sloshed across borders like water. Leaders could optimise globally and execute locally - a neat fiction that made multinationals look omniscient.
That assumption is dead. Buried beneath a world fractured along old lines of nation and new lines of code. The fantasy of a frictionless globe has expired, and with it the illusion that business floats above the battlefield.
The collision no one prepared for
Boards long treated geopolitics as weather - important, but distant. A backdrop in the risk register.
Technology, meanwhile, was plumbing. Chips were pipes. Networks, conduits. Data centres, quiet vaults of humming machinery.
But the boundary has collapsed. AI has made the pipes political. Your cloud is someone’s arsenal. Your network is someone’s border. Your data centre is someone’s fortress.
The new fault lines
Technology is political. Semiconductors are battlegrounds of national destiny. Clouds are no longer neutral; sovereignty is staked in their skies. Data, once a commodity, is now a passport - stamped, regulated, quarantined.
Supply chains are political. Resilience is mandated by governments legislating as if survival were at stake.
Capital is political. Sovereign funds tilt markets. Security reviews rewrite deals.
Every infrastructure bet is now a geopolitical bet.
The leader’s task
You are not asked to be a foreign minister. But you cannot pretend this is not your problem.
The task is translation: to turn geopolitics into corporate consequence. Decide where to localise and where not to fragment. Sense where state interests will blow wind into your sails - and where they will drop anchor on your ambition. Recognise when the ground is about to harden beneath your feet, and walk away before it turns to stone.
The simple truth
Strategy no longer sits above geopolitics. It sits inside it.
You may not care about geopolitics. But geopolitics now cares, relentlessly, about you.
The boardroom has become a borderland. The infrastructure you thought was corporate has become sovereign.