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The Keskin Report: War, Chips, and the Gulf's Burning Roadmap

Five briefs on the week tech got swallowed by geopolitics — and what founders need to understand before pitching into the fire.

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Dario Keskin

May 13 · 3 min read

Key takeaways

The Iran war is generating real questions about Saudi Vision 2030's viability as an investment thesis, with mainstream international press now openly covering the damage.
The Trump-Xi Beijing summit puts tech tariffs and chip supply chains at the center of the most consequential bilateral meeting in nearly a decade — founders with hardware exposure should be watching closely.
Strait of Hormuz transit talks signal ongoing regional instability that has direct but undermodeled implications for Gulf data center economics and energy-dependent digital infrastructure.
Netanyahu's confirmed secret UAE visit tests the durability of Abraham Accords-era tech and investment flows under active geopolitical stress.
AI reliability research on vision-language models and structured data extraction is advancing fast — enterprise AI founders ignoring the academic literature do so at their own risk.

Let's be honest: this was not a week for product launches. This was a week where the map changed, and every technology bet placed in the Gulf over the last five years just got stress-tested in real time. Here are the five things I was watching.

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**1. Vision 2030 Is Bleeding Out in Real Time**

Multiple outlets are now openly asking whether the Iran war has functionally ended Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 as a coherent investment thesis. That is not a fringe take anymore — it is being published…

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