When U.S. forces captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and senior officials in Washington spoke openly about overseeing a political transition, most coverage treated the event as a dramatic episode in Latin American politics.

That interpretation is incomplete.

What happened in Venezuela should also be understood as an energy event—and in the current decade, energy is no longer separable from artificial intelligence, industrial capacity, and military power.

Venezuela possesses approximately 303 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, the largest of any country on Earth . At current prices hovering around $55–60 per barrel, that represents $16–18 trillion of in-ground value.

Even partial monetization matters. Before years of sanctions, mismanagement, and infrastructure decay, Venezuela produced more than 3 million barrels per day. By 2023–2024, production had fallen to roughly 700–800 thousand barrels per day, or about one quarter of historical capacity .

The strategic implication is not that this oil “changed hands overnight,” but that a constrained, geopolitically isolated resource base may now be reintegrated into Western-aligned energy systems over time.

That distinction is critical—and powerful.

Venezuelan crude is predominantly heavy and extra-heavy. This is not a trivial detail. Refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast—particularly in Texas and Louisiana—were deliberately engineered over decades to process heavy crudes from Venezuela and Canada. U.S. Energy Information Administration data and industry reporting have repeatedly noted that Gulf Coast refineries are among the best in the world at handling these grades. This creates a natural alignment:

In strategic terms, this is routing power, not just supply. Routing power determines:

The global AI race is commonly described as a contest over semiconductors, talent, and models. Increasingly, that description is incomplete.

The International Energy Agency has warned that data centers and AI workloads are set to become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand globally, placing new stress on power systems. Policy institutes and analysts have echoed this concern, highlighting how compute expansion is colliding with grid limits.

Crucially, when renewable generation cannot fully meet demand, grids fall back on dispatchable energy sources, most often natural gas. Bloomberg Intelligence has modeled scenarios in which AI-driven data center growth materially increases gas demand later this decade.

Oil does not directly run servers. But oil stabilizes the ecosystem that makes large-scale compute possible:

In this sense, energy volatility becomes compute volatility.

Countries that can dampen energy shocks can scale AI infrastructure faster. Countries exposed to supply risk face higher costs, slower permitting, and greater fragility.

China’s direct reliance on Venezuelan oil is often exaggerated. Reuters reporting suggests Venezuela accounts for only 4% of China’s crude imports. But geopolitics is rarely about absolutes. It is about margins and pressure points.

Venezuela has been part of a broader constellation of energy suppliers—alongside Iran and Russia—that operate under sanctions, opaque shipping practices, and alternative financing structures. As these nodes are squeezed or realigned, the cumulative effect is higher uncertainty for Beijing:

Energy insecurity does not cause conflict. But it raises the cost of strategic risk, including military risk.

AI-enabled military capability depends on far more than algorithms. It requires continuous training, large-scale inference, resilient communications, and secure logistics—all of which are energy-intensive.

The states best positioned for AI dominance in the 2030s will not simply be those with the most advanced models, but those with the industrial and energy depth to sustain them under stress.

From that perspective, energy alignment is not an economic footnote. It is a precondition for sustained technological power.

There is no public evidence that U.S. action in Venezuela was explicitly undertaken to secure energy for AI infrastructure. Claiming otherwise would overreach.

What is evident is that Venezuela represents a structural lever at a moment when energy, compute, and geopolitical power are converging.

By reducing uncertainty for itself and its allies—and increasing it for competitors—the United States strengthens the foundations upon which AI, industrial capacity, and military capability are built.

Viewed narrowly, Venezuela is a regional intervention. Viewed systemically, it fits a broader pattern:

In the twentieth century, oil determined industrial power.
In the twenty-first, it increasingly determines who can scale intelligence—artificial and otherwise—without interruption.

Venezuela is not the whole story.

But it is a reminder that beneath the AI race lies an older, harder constraint—and that control over it still shapes global power.

Sam Obeidat is a senior AI strategist, venture builder, and product leader with over 15 years of global experience. He has led AI transformations across 40+ organizations in 12+ sectors, including defense, aerospace, finance, healthcare, and government. As President of World AI X, a global corporate venture studio, Sam works with top executives and domain experts to co-develop high-impact AI use cases, validate them with host partners, and pilot them with investor backing—turning bold ideas into scalable ventures. Under his leadership, World AI X has launched ventures now valued at over $100 million, spanning sectors like defense tech, hedge funds, and education. Sam combines deep technical fluency with real-world execution. He’s built enterprise-grade AI systems from the ground up and developed proprietary frameworks that trigger KPIs, reduce costs, unlock revenue, and turn traditional organizations into AI-native leaders. He’s also the host of the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) Program, an executive training initiative empowering leaders to drive responsible AI transformation at scale.

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