Mike Winston, investor, on compute as civilizational infrastructure

In May 2025, the United States agreed to let the United Arab Emirates import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips a year and to back a 5-gigawatt computing campus in Abu Dhabi. The terms looked closer to an instrument of statecraft than a commercial transaction, which is roughly how Mike Winston has come to describe compute.

Winston comes at this as a markets practitioner rather than a policy academic. He’s a CFA charterholder who spent five years running a billion-dollar merger...