Muscat felt like a harbour the night Sinbad the Omani Sailor opened. The hall lifted with strings and voices as an old voyage met a new century. Days earlier, I had stood at the Berkeley Forum, speaking about sustainability, storytelling and strategy.
Between stage and sea, the week was filled with private dinners and one-on-one exchanges that pressed the same question. Who shapes access to the future? Atoms and algorithms carry promise, and they carry gates. Leadership will be measured by how those gates are built and how many are invited through.
On a virtual call, an Australian friend invoked Chernobyl. She called it a lesson in leadership before engineering. Secrecy, hierarchy and fear accelerated the crisis. The insight was relevant to our other debates. If truth is rationed, systems fail in the seams we pretend are strong. The same instinct appears in the way the world treats strategic infrastructure today.
Consider nuclear energy, which offers a clear path to deep decarbonisation for countries able to adopt it. Momentum is real, with many governments exploring new capacity and lenders beginning to test support. Yet access will not be universal, and that reality raises questions of inclusion, power and pace.
Standards and finance are still in institutions of the wealthy. Export controls and safeguards protect the world, yet they often sit beside rules written far from the grids that need power. A more inclusive approach would pair firm guardrails with capacity building, transparent finance and regional partnerships so willing newcomers can move safely rather than wait indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the digital frontier poses its own inclusion test.
Data centres and high-end AI clusters are now strategic infrastructure, and their geography is narrow. Only 32 countries host specialised AI facilities, with the United States and China dominating. Whole regions are nearly absent from the map. This is more than technical; it shapes who researches, builds companies and sets norms. The footprint also matters.
Electricity demand from computing is rising, and in many regions, the water required for cooling is a binding constraint. Communities expect honest accounting of megawatts and megalitres and a say in how facilities grow.
Africa offers a clear picture of the divide. The continent is home to about 18 per cent of the world’s people, yet holds under 1 per cent of global data centre capacity. Analysts see a need for roughly 700 new facilities, alongside reliable, clean power.
Development finance is starting to move with regional projects and multilateral backing for carrier-neutral hubs, but the scale is large. Planning for power and water together will decide which projects endure and whether benefits land locally through skills, research and jobs.
Across those conversations, we spoke as much about narratives as about hardware, because stories decide where capital and courage go. But I kept coming back to design and how inclusion should start at the very beginning.
In nuclear, it looks like safety cases, regulator training and finance to make first-of-a-kind projects viable for newcomers. In digital, this means putting servers near the people they serve, powering them with renewables, opening lawful pathways for regional data, and training operators and defenders in place.
In storytelling, it means commissioning lived expertise and letting it lead, so coverage reflects frontline realities and invites better decisions.
The week closed in Muscat beneath the chandeliers of the Royal Opera House Muscat for the world premiere of Sinbad the Omani Sailor, and his arc was discovery with responsibility. He returns with knowledge to share. The transition asks the same of us. Build systems that tell the truth, share access with care and measure success by how many we bring along.
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