US Signs Energy and AI Deals in the Balkans

The United States and several US-linked companies signed a series of energy and AI agreements with Balkan countries this week, expanding Washington’s footprint in a region where infrastructure, capital, and geopolitical influence increasingly travel together.

The deals include a $6 billion, 20-year LNG agreement for Albania, US backing for a Bosnia-Croatia gas pipeline, and a planned AI and data centre project in central Croatia that has been valued at 50 billion euros (Reuters, 2026).

Taken together, the agreements suggest that AI is now entering the region not as a standalone technology story but as part of a much broader package of strategic infrastructure. Energy security, cloud capacity, data centre buildout, and geopolitical alignment are beginning to fold into one another, especially in places where influence is still fluid and long-term dependencies are still being written.

AI infrastructure does not arrive weightlessly. A one-gigawatt data centre project in Croatia is not simply an investment in compute. It is also a bet on power availability, land, permitting, grid upgrades, and the political terms under which future digital capacity will operate. In that sense, the project says as much about regional industrial strategy as it does about AI ambition.

The energy side of the story makes that even clearer. The US-backed pipeline linking Croatia and Bosnia is explicitly meant to reduce Bosnia’s dependence on Russian gas, while the Albanian LNG agreement deepens long-term American presence in the region’s energy system. These are not separate developments coincidentally announced together. They reflect a fairly coherent understanding that whoever helps build the pipes, wires, and server capacity often ends up shaping the digital future as well.

There is, of course, an asymmetry running underneath all this. The AI project in Croatia remains a letter of intent, with construction expected from 2027 and operations from 2029, subject to permits and grid upgrades. But even at this early stage, the political signal is unmistakable. The Balkans are becoming a site where AI influence will be negotiated through industrial deals, energy corridors, and infrastructure financing long before it is discussed in the language of ethics or governance.