The CTO Show Brief: Issue 149

Author

Mehmet Gonullu
December 14, 2025

Welcome to Issue 149 of The CTO Show Brief.

The week of December 8 marked a structural turning point: sovereign capital stopped behaving like liquidity and started behaving like strategy. Across media M&A, AI infrastructure, and export enforcement, the same pattern emerged—state actors repositioning themselves as principals, not participants, in the technology stack.

Whether you’re a long-time reader or a first-time reader—grab your coffee, and let’s dive into what’s shaping tech and venture this week!

The Gulf Enters the Studio

A $108 billion hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery—backed by PIF, QIA, and a newly surfaced Abu Dhabi vehicle called L'imad Holding—signals more than a media transaction. It signals the arrival of coordinated Gulf capital in culturally sensitive Western assets. The structure is surgical: $24 billion in non-voting equity, governance rights waived, political risk hedged through Affinity Partners. What matters isn't the outcome; it's the template. Sovereign funds have found a formation that places them inside the information ecosystem without triggering CFIUS. Founders building content, media infrastructure, or platforms adjacent to news should understand: the exit map now includes Abu Dhabi and Riyadh as primary destinations.

Compute Is the New Oil—Literally

QIA and Brookfield announced a $20 billion joint venture called Qai, designed to export Qatari energy as AI compute. Simultaneously, G42 unveiled the "Intelligence Grid"—a framework positioning sovereign AI infrastructure as a utility. The investment thesis has inverted: value capture is migrating from the model layer (increasingly commoditized) to the infrastructure layer (scarce, capital-intensive, energy-bound). For founders, the implication is direct. If you're building tooling for data center deployment, industrial power management, or regional cloud compliance, the customer base just expanded dramatically. The Gulf isn't buying AI companies—it's building the rails.

The Chip War Goes Criminal

Operation Gatekeeper dismantled a $160 million GPU smuggling ring funneling Nvidia H100s to China through shell companies and falsified shipping records. The DOJ charged individuals with Export Control Reform Act violations—punishable by prison, not fines. This escalation changes the compliance calculus for any founder touching dual-use hardware. Know-your-customer is no longer a fintech concern; it's an export control requirement. Startups that embed military-grade traceability into their supply chains will outcompete those that treat compliance as overhead.

Identity Is the New Perimeter

Saviynt raised $700 million at a $3 billion valuation to manage access for both human and machine identities. The thesis is simple: agentic AI needs credentials. As enterprises deploy autonomous agents that interact with sensitive systems, identity governance becomes the security layer—not firewalls, not endpoint detection. VCs are actively hunting the middleware for machine-to-machine trust. This is the new enterprise security stack, and it's being funded now.

The pattern across these signals is consistent: the locus of control in technology is shifting from code to capital, from models to infrastructure, from private innovation to sovereign alignment. Founders and investors who recognize this will stop optimizing for Silicon Valley approval and start building for a world where the acquirer, the regulator, and the customer may all report to the same flag.

 

🎙️Episodes Recap:

In this episode, Kingsley Maunder breaks down one of the most overlooked aspects of startup building: proper validation. With over two decades in the startup ecosystem, building products used by Disney, EA Sports, Snap, and more, Kingsley shares the hard-won lessons behind his framework, The SALT Test.

In this episode, Gabriel Jarrosson , founder and managing partner at Lobster Capital, breaks down what truly drives breakout startups inside the world’s most competitive ecosystem. Before becoming a YC-focused investor, Gabriel built seven startups, failed four, and bootstrapped one to one million ARR alone — no co-founder, no employees, no AI.

In this episode, Mehmet sits down with Daniel Nikic , a global investment researcher who has analyzed over 15,000 companies across the US, Europe, and the Middle East. Together, they unpack the hard truths founders need to understand about fundraising, investor psychology, market geography, and why most rounds fail long before the first term sheet.

📖 From Nowhere to Next

 Every week I share startup lessons and stories through The CTO Show Brief. But if you want to go deeper, my book From Nowhere to Next brings together the experiences and insights that shaped my own journey.

Thanks for reading — and for being part of this growing, global-minded network.

 — Mehmet