On 8 December 2025, Lebanon presented what appeared to be a technical breakthrough.
The American company Oracle and Lebanon’s Minister of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence, Kamal Shehadeh, signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) committing to train 50,000 participants from the public and private sectors over the next five years in cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning.
Officials described the agreement as a “free grant,” part of a national program designed to prepare Lebanon for the age of AI. In a country facing economic collapse and institutional decline, the government portrayed the agreement as a step toward digital renewal.
Yet in West Asia – where wars increasingly unfold through data integration and communications dominance – cloud architecture functions as the operating system of the state. Control over that architecture shapes fiscal continuity, administrative endurance, and security resilience. Lebanon’s alignment, therefore, extends far beyond workforce training and enters the terrain of sovereign control.
Training as structural alignment
Minister Shehadeh has insisted that the agreement “does not include data exchange, or access to public sector information,” and is strictly limited to training 50,000 Lebanese staff members.
Such assurances address immediate concerns, yet they leave untouched the architectural implications of calibrating an entire generation of civil servants and engineers to a single proprietary ecosystem.
Cloud computing defines the environment in which tax systems, identity registries, customs platforms, health databases, financial clearing mechanisms, and security infrastructures are built and maintained. Training tens of thousands of personnel inside Oracle’s proprietary framework standardizes institutional logic and future procurement pathways.
Oracle’s training programs focus almost exclusively on its own proprietary software and enterprise systems. Capacity building under one vendor’s standards inevitably influences compatibility requirements, system design, and digital governance frameworks across ministries and agencies.
Dependency grows quietly. As soon as state systems are written inside a single architecture, the price of leaving rises. Maintenance contracts, software updates, and cybersecurity integration lock institutions into the same framework over time.
For a state grappling with fiscal collapse, architectural entanglement carries strategic implications that extend well beyond immediate implementation.
Jurisdiction and leverage
Sovereignty in the digital era is inseparable from jurisdiction. Oracle operates under US law. The 2018 Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act – the CLOUD Act – grants American authorities the ability to compel US-based companies to provide data under defined judicial frameworks, regardless of where that data is physically stored. Corporate nationality, in this sense, carries legal authority that transcends geography.
Lebanese officials emphasize that no public data will be exchanged under the MoU. The broader issue concerns control over the operational environment in which data is created, encrypted, processed, updated, and secured.
Reliance on an American-sourced infrastructure also introduces exposure to US regulatory decisions, service suspensions, or software update controls during periods of political tension. Technological integration generates leverage that may become consequential during a crisis.
The CLOUD Act operates within a wider intelligence-sharing network known as Five Eyes – linking the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in a highly integrated signals intelligence framework. In the cloud era, intelligence integration extends beyond intercepted communications into the architecture through which data flows are managed.
Lebanon enters this ecosystem without a modern data governance law, without a national classification regime for sensitive information, without sovereign encryption key management, and without a multi-vendor cloud strategy. Architectural alignment in the absence of institutional safeguards increases structural asymmetry.
Data supremacy on the northern front
The regional balance of power clarifies the stakes as Israel’s military doctrine integrates data systems directly into operational planning. The concept of Network-Centric Targeting merges communications metadata, population movement patterns, surveillance imagery, and open-source intelligence (OSINT) into real-time targeting cycles.
Decision windows narrow and strike precision sharpens, as civilian environments are transformed into mapped data structures that can be read, processed, and acted upon almost instantly.
Such capability depends on cloud-scale computational infrastructure capable of processing vast data flows in seconds.
Israel’s Project Nimbus – transferring major segments of governmental digital infrastructure into cloud environments managed by US technology firms – reflected a doctrine of continuity under fire, ensuring operational resilience even when physical infrastructure is attacked.
Lebanon has experienced the consequences of intelligence imbalance. Israeli access to Lebanese telecommunications has enabled localized warnings, real-time monitoring, and targeted assassinations during recent escalations. Digital vulnerability has translated into strategic disadvantage, reinforcing the asymmetry that defines the northern front.
This reality does not require theoretical assumptions to understand. At a telecommunications center on the edge of a southern border area, where calls from entire villages pass through rows of metal racks lit by dim green indicators, a technician once noticed that data traffic was behaving unusually during a period of tension. There was no exceptional network load and no power disruption, yet some routes briefly lost stability for a few seconds before returning to normal. For users, nothing appeared wrong; calls continued, and the internet remained functional. But to those who read networks like military planners read maps, it was a quiet warning that the operational architecture had not been designed to defend itself under conditions of cyber or electronic warfare, but to function in peacetime, constantly monitored by a watchful adversary.
A Lebanese telecommunications expert who spent many years operating network infrastructure summarizes the issue in one sentence: “The question is not where the data is stored, but who has the ability to operate the system when it fails.” He adds, “In modern wars, you do not need to steal information; it is enough to understand how the system works in order to stop it at the moment you choose.”
Cloud alignment unfolds within this existing imbalance.
Oracle within a geopolitical ecosystem
Oracle’s global positioning intensifies the sensitivity of Lebanon’s decision.
The company specializes in high-security enterprise database environments across ministries of finance, defense supply chains, and intelligence-linked institutions. Its infrastructure operates within US defense ecosystems and allied security networks.
The company’s billionaire founder, Larry Ellison, has maintained close relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Inside Telecom. Oracle’s executive leadership has publicly affirmed the company’s “unequivocal” commitment to Israel, and Ellison has been identified as a major political donor closely connected to Israeli leadership.
These relationships illuminate the geopolitical ecosystem within which the corporation operates. When such a company becomes embedded in the digital transformation of a state engaged in active conflict with Israel, structural alignment intersects with intelligence asymmetry in ways that cannot be dismissed as a technical coincidence.
The ‘technopolar’ shift
The international order has shifted in ways that place technology corporations at the center of strategic power.
The concept of a “technopolar world,” as articulated by Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer, describes a system in which large technology companies rival nation-states in geopolitical influence by shaping the digital order and exerting power over data, platforms, and algorithms.
In the US, the evolution from the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) reflected recognition that military supremacy in the 21st century depends as much on computational endurance as on kinetic force. China has integrated its national cloud architecture into command-and-control systems powered by AI.
Therefore, cloud architecture constitutes strategic infrastructure at the highest level of statecraft. Lebanon’s integration unfolds within this global transformation, where computational resilience increasingly defines state endurance.
The long arc of dependency
The description of the MoU as cost-free obscures the longer arc of institutional alignment.
Training 50,000 participants over five years within a proprietary architecture builds a workforce calibrated to that ecosystem, shaping how ministries recruit talent, how software decisions are made, and how future infrastructure expands along lines of compatibility.
Dependence rarely arrives through formal obligation. It takes shape gradually, as systems become familiar and alternatives grow harder to pursue.
Even close US allies in Europe have recognized the risks of this dynamic, investing heavily in open-source alternatives and tightening data protection laws in an effort to protect their digital autonomy.
Lebanon has yet to build comparable safeguards that would shield its digital infrastructure from external legal and strategic pressures.
Sovereignty under pressure
Lebanon’s engagement with global technology firms is inevitable. Administrative modernization requires computational infrastructure, AI integration, and data systems capable of sustaining governance in real time.
The strategic question concerns sequencing and preparedness. Sovereign control over digital architecture determines whether modernization strengthens institutional endurance or deepens structural exposure.
In a region where Israeli military advantage is inseparable from intelligence integration, architectural alignment carries geopolitical consequences.
Cloud infrastructure now constitutes the framework through which fiscal systems operate, security agencies coordinate, and governance persists during crisis. A state that embeds itself within externally governed digital ecosystems without parallel sovereign safeguards narrows its margin of autonomy and increases its exposure to external leverage.
Lebanon is reaching a point where digital transformation and national security can no longer be treated as separate tracks. What happens next will depend on whether the state builds the legal and technical safeguards needed to keep control of its own digital infrastructure, rather than allowing it to be shaped by external powers that already influence the region’s balance of power.
Originally written by: Jamal Meselmani
Source: The Cradle.co
Published on: 18 February 2026
Link to original article: Lebanon, the cloud, and the limits of sovereignty
