Lebanon Is Living Through the AI Boom With the Lights Off

If you are easily rattled by what is happening around you, skip this article.

Most of what follows already happened. One prediction is marked.

In March, drones hit Amazon’s data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, banks and payment apps went dark. It was the first confirmed military strike on a major cloud provider.

Recently, I sat in a Beirut office teaching five people how to write a prompt.

They are a statistics team: five people and a manager. They collect the numbers of a public body, by hand, and they archive them. The archive is neat. Nobody uses it to see a trend.

I had come to help them build a dashboard. I could not start there. They knew AI existed and had tried it, but mostly for cosmetic things. First I had to teach them prompting, and how to use the tools properly.

Walking out, I felt sorry for how far behind they are, and for how little time anyone has given them to catch up. Then I remembered how far behind I am too.

A ladder with no top

I built AI tools in Beirut. I sat with donors and funders to explain them, and institutions are about to adopt them. Even from that seat, I read the news about the people who build the models and feel behind.

The pace is not abstract for me. One email is enough. A new tool appears, and the app I finished last month needs updating.

In July, more than a thousand staff from frontier AI labs signed an open letter. They asked governments to build tools that would let the pace of AI be slowed if needed. An OpenAI researcher described a large gap between how fast progress looks from inside the labs and how fast it looks from outside. Zvi Mowshowitz, who follows this closely, wrote: “Even I cannot keep up.”

The people building AI cannot keep up with it. I cannot keep up with them. The statistics team is only starting.

Is this on purpose?

I asked myself whether this is deliberate: one part of the world racing ahead, another left to its old problems. I do not think so.

The same letter shows why. The insiders themselves asked for brakes. And I found no lab that slowed down because of it. Anthropic offered outside evaluators. Others endorsed the idea. None said it would stop, because whoever stops first falls behind. Everyone wants brakes and nobody can use them alone.

Nobody is aimed at Lebanon. We are collateral damage in a race.

The years we lost

Lebanon’s crisis began in 2019. ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. Every year since, the world has moved forward by another generation of tools, and we spent those years counting what the banks would not release and what the generator costs.

The gap is not a distance we can close with a good year. It is a rate. With a technology that compounds, crisis time is not paused time. It is lost time with interest. A country that stops does not resume where it stopped. It resumes further behind.

Someone will say tools get easier, so latecomers catch up fast. A person can. An institution cannot. Trained teams, clean data and working habits take time to build, and time is exactly what a crisis eats.

The lab leaders say the pace has increased sharply since the summer of 2026. Others dispute it. Even if they are half right, every month of delay now costs more.

What is on the target list

Last month, Iran’s security chief warned that data centres, cables and AI facilities could be targets if war with the US resumes.

Geography still matters. About a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Nearly a fifth of its internet traffic passes through Bab al-Mandeb, a strait 26 kilometres wide at its narrowest. What runs through this geography has changed. It used to be barrels. Now it is also bits.

I do not think anyone fights this war only for AI. But the target list shows what the region is now worth: computing power, cables, and the people who build and run them.

Lebanon has no data centers to bomb. What it has is people, and it has been exporting them for years. Two of mine are in Canada.

Here is my prediction. Whether borders change when this war ends, I cannot say. AI will have moved again. What is happening to us is unfortunate. The world did not pause for us.

For the average Lebanese, with all the baggage he already carries, even looking up is tiring, let alone joining the AI race.

The lights are off here. Elsewhere, they are building.

Karim Chebaklo sits on the board of the Beirut Port Authority and builds AI tools for Lebanese institutions