Dauren Kerimkulov advises boards, shareholders and foreign investors on strategy and corporate development in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
getty
In my experience, cross-border deals rarely fail in the data room. They fail months earlier, somewhere between the second dinner and the first draft of a term sheet, because one side misread who decides or how long trust takes.
I’ve spent most of my career on both sides of that table, selling to global brands as a media executive and later helping foreign investors and chambers of commerce reach the leadership of large local companies. Years in Big Four audit and consulting taught me something a spreadsheet won’t: A deal can work in the model and still die in the org chart.
The clock now runs faster. A strong AI product can find paying users in dozens of countries within its first year. In his April 2026 letter to shareholders, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote that AI will likely be adopted far faster than electricity or the internet. Yet what decides the next stage usually sits across a border: compute and power, enterprise contracts, strategic capital, a regulator’s approval. Institutions control those, and they keep their own calendars.
Why Speed Makes Partnerships Harder
Compute deals now behave like infrastructure deals. According to the International Energy Agency, capital spending by five large technology companies topped $400 billion in 2025 and is set to grow another 75% in 2026, while gas turbines, transformers and grid connections have turned into bottlenecks. Take-or-pay clauses and power availability used to be the language of pipelines and ports. They now turn up in AI term sheets.
Capital is also getting pickier. The UN Conference on Trade and Development’s “World Investment Report 2026” found that 20 economies took more than 80% of global foreign direct investment in 2025, with AI-related megaprojects behind much of the growth.
And the rules move. In May 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce rescinded its AI Diffusion Rule on advanced chip exports two days before companies had to comply. A term sheet drafted in the first quarter can live under a different rulebook by the third.
What I Have Seen Work
1. Anchor agreements in institutions.
People rotate. The minister who backed your project gets reassigned, and the CEO who loved your demo retires. A board resolution or a framework agreement stays on the record. When I helped a business association sign a memorandum with an intergovernmental organization to restructure around international standards, the signing was the easy part. The work lasted because both institutions owned it.
Before the first pitch, map who signs, who can block and who must be comfortable before anyone signs. That last person is usually missing from the invite list.
2. Sell a use case and package it for the person who signs.
The global luxury houses I worked with weren’t buying reach in a country. They bought a defined product, a digital video and photo series built around their brand. Many of the same marketing teams now commission AI-generated video, and the logic hasn’t changed: They pay for an output they can picture.
When packaging foreign partners’ offers into pitches for the teams of large local companies, I found that the versions that moved forward fit on one page and answered three questions. What’s the buyer’s problem? What does the buyer commit? What does walking away cost?
3. Bring more than money.
Capital is the most available commodity in the room. Technology, purchase commitments and access to a home market are harder to find. When SoftBank and OpenAI announced their Japanese joint venture in 2025, SoftBank committed $3 billion a year to deploy the technology across its group, and agreed to second sales staff and engineers. That’s capital arriving with a customer and a sales force attached.
The deals I helped close worked the same way. Read your cap table as a distribution map.
4. Keep the relationship map in-house.
Banks, law firms and consultants bring structure and credibility, then move on when the mandate ends. The knowledge of whose quiet sign-off gates everything else shouldn’t leave with them. In every market that matters, give one person inside the company ownership of the partnership: the stakeholder map, the decision calendar and every commitment made. A partnership that is everyone’s side job ends up as no one’s job.
Where Cross-Border Deals Go Wrong
Most failures I’ve watched were avoidable. The most common is mistaking access for a mandate. A warm meeting with a minister or chairman is a signal, nothing more. Leave every meeting with a written next step, an owner and a date.
Close behind is treating governing law as ground truth. A contract under English law still has to live with local tax, labor and data rules, so run the implementation review before signing.
Then there’s signing ahead of infrastructure. Power, connectivity and capacity often get promised before they exist. Make readiness a condition precedent, and price the gap from day one.
Calendars collide, too. A startup decides in a week. A telecom operator decides in a budget cycle; I learned that running B2B and B2G projects inside one. Agree on a joint decision calendar before anyone drafts a term sheet.
And watch for the memorandum that gets celebrated instead of executed. Memorandums of understanding are often signed in front of photographers and then die quietly. Attach a 90-day plan with named owners on both sides, or don’t bother announcing it.
The Takeaway
Dimon also wrote that AI investment is not a speculative bubble, yet “we cannot predict the ultimate winners and losers in AI-related industries.” If you can’t pick the winners, I think a well-structured partnership is the closest thing to an option: limited downside, plus a seat at the table when the market turns.
One rule has held in every cycle I’ve worked through: Capital arrives last. So the useful question for leaders is how much time they’re prepared to spend before they invest anything. Software may scale overnight. Trust still runs on local time.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
