Previously on my Power Pundit Youtube Channel: Jensen Huang chartered his jet to Anchorage to catch Air Force One at the refueling stop. Marco Rubio boarded the same plane in Washington under a Mandarin spelling Beijing rewrote so the airport would let him in. The Chip Security Act sits in committee with bipartisan sponsors, ready to brick every smuggled Nvidia chip in mainland China the moment Commerce writes the rules. Tehran is the demonstration. Beijing is the audience. Taiwan is the silent question Xi cannot answer.
That was the video.
What did not fit in twelve minutes is a second story sitting underneath all of it. On May 9, four days before Trump landed in Beijing, Iran’s state media published a regulatory proposal most observers passed over entirely.
It was a framework for seven undersea fiber-optic cables.
The Cables
The seven undersea fiber-optic cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz carry a meaningful share of global internet traffic between Asia, the Persian Gulf, Europe, and East Africa. Most international communications between South Asian data centers and European endpoints route through this corridor. The cables sit on the seabed in waters Iran controls or contests.
On May 9, state media linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard published a detailed regulatory proposal. Iran wants permits for any traffic transiting these cables. Iran wants fees collected by Iranian companies. Iran wants Iranian regulators with technical access to the routing infrastructure.
This is the digital version of the Hormuz tanker tolls Tehran has floated for years on the oil side. Same chokepoint, different commodity. The commodity this time is bandwidth.
Now, what does this have to do with the Chip story?
Compute requires three things. It requires chips. It requires energy. It requires data movement. The video covered the chip side and the energy side. What it did not cover is that compute means nothing if the data cannot move.
Training a frontier AI model is not a single-location operation. Training data flows in from dozens of sources. Model checkpoints flow out to inference clusters. Distributed training across data centers in different countries is increasingly common as power and cooling constraints fragment the industry. All of it requires high-bandwidth links between continents.
If Iran imposes a regulatory framework on the Hormuz cables, every Asian AI company sending data to a European inference cluster pays an Iranian toll. The alternatives are longer, slower, or more politically exposed. The Suez routes are increasingly contested. The Pacific routes have their own bottlenecks at the Luzon Strait.
Trump controls one chokepoint at the hardware layer through the Foster Bill. Iran is positioning to control the other at the data layer. Two chokepoints, one resource, and a clock running on both:
