UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar: Three strategies for the AI race

Gulf nations are pivoting to artificial intelligence in a big way right now, but those pivots look very different depending on which country you’re talking about.

Here’s a rundown:

• The United Arab Emirates is going all in on AI — and it’s doing it mostly in lockstep with the United States. That includes building a mammoth, 5 GW data center campus in cooperation with OpenAI and other US firms; backing Western AI companies through state-backed investment vehicle MGX, whose first fund closed with USD 49 bn in commitments; and building its own Arabic-language large language models.
• Saudi Arabia is more focused on building capacity inside its borders. Humain, the nation’s PIF-owned AI champion, has signed at least USD 23 bn in deals with US tech firms including Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Qualcomm, largely to build computing capacity at home. Humain plans to build 250 MW of data center capacity by the end of this year, 1.7 GW in 2027, roughly 3 GW by 2030, and 6 GW by 2034. Humain also offers an Arabic-language chatbot powered by ALLaM, a family of Arabic-English LLMs originally developed by the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA). Humain isn’t uninterested in international exposure: It has announced a USD 10 bn venture fund to back startups in the US, Europe, and Asia, a USD 10 bn partnership with AMD that spans the kingdom and the US, and has made a USD 3 bn investment in xAI.
• Qatar is being more cautious, partnering with Canadian investment manager Brookfield on a USD 20 bn joint venture that includes both a data center in Qatar and international AI infrastructure projects. The smallest of the Big Three Gulf economies, Qatar has been among the hardest hit by the fallout from the ongoing US-Iran war and has slashed public spending. Still, its wealth fund continues to invest, Semafor notes.

Investments by other GCC countries are far more limited: Kuwait is the leader among the also-rans. Its sovereign wealth fund has invested USD 9 bn into digital services and AI over the past five years, according to GlobalSWF. In June it backed a new USD 10 bn AI infrastructure venture with KKR, Nvidia, and Vistra. Cash-strapped Bahrain has made more limited investments in AI life sciences projects, while Oman has made what look like minor investments in Elon Musk’s xAI (now part of SpaceX) and some other Western outfits, but clear USD figures have never been disclosed.

Those distinctions could make a huge difference for how AI develops in those countries, especially during the pivotal next five years as the technology becomes an ever greater force in the global economy — and a more important battlefield in the ideological and economic struggle between the US and China.

The different approaches will also have significant consequences for companies that plan to rely on those nations for their AI computing power. “Be careful with the phrase ‘Gulf AI capacity,’” Guney Yildiz (LinkedIn), a senior adviser on geopolitics and strategic insights for the sustainability consultancy Anthesis Group, tells EnterpriseAM. “Renting from an MGX-backed operator and renting from a Humain campus that is still standing itself up are different risks. I would not price them as one pool.”

One big distinction is between the UAE’s full embrace of the United States and Saudi Arabia, which is keeping more distance. Abu Dhabi has pledged to completely decouple its AI operations and investments from China, reducing the danger that secretive AI tech shared by the US will leak into Beijing’s hands. The Trump administration released new export rules in July granting a handful of UAE firms access to the most advanced Nvidia AI chips without export licenses.

“MGX’s distinguishing bet … is that the winning position is to own pieces of every layer at once and to be present in Washington’s most sensitive tech disputes rather than adjacent to them,” Yildiz wrote in a recent Forbes piece. Saudi Arabia has not made a similar pledge when it comes to AI investments and has not received a similar deal from the US Commerce Department. In an earlier round of negotiations, Humain did win authorization to buy 35k of the most advanced Nvidia AI chips to power its growing data center operations — the same deal won by the UAE’s G42.

Saudi hasn’t distanced itself as much from China — state oil giant Aramco’s venture arm, for example, is a backer of the high-profile Chinese model maker Z.ai. And big UAE players continue to do business with Chinese tech giants: Network operator e& explicitly included Huawei in its AI strategy for 2026, and du announced a Huawei-backed network deployment at Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates this month. Alibaba Cloud said in September it would expand its UAE data-center footprint.

Abu Dhabi has also taken a much more aggressive approach to investing in Western AI companies. MGX has committed capital to Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI (now part of SpaceX), Aligned Data Centers (an AI infrastructure firm), and TikTok’s US joint venture, in which it holds a 15% stake.

That’s just part of a far larger business relationship between the nations. US President Donald Trump announced USD 200 bn worth of US-UAE deals during the first foreign trip of his second term — though it’s not clear how many of those deals will come to fruition. That was part of a USD 1.4 tn investment package spanning AI, technology, and energy.

That expansive relationship gives the Emirates outsized influence over AI policy discussions — both at those firms and inside the US government.

But that tight bond could backfire, especially if the US decides to be more restrictive about how it shares the most advanced AI computer chips and other advanced technology or if it falls behind in the AI race with China. “The fundamental story is the US-Emirati financial relationship and doubling down on that,” Justin Alexander, a Gulf business analyst and director of Khalij Economics, tells EnterpriseAM. “That may not make sense from a security perspective, but it makes sense from a technological perspective.”

MEANWHILE- Saudi Arabia may have some critical advantages in the AI race — especially when it comes to building domestic capacity. At more than 2 mn sq km, the kingdom has more space than the UAE or Qatar to build a geographically distributed data center network. The nation’s electricity infrastructure is also robust enough to power AI data centers in most of the places executives would want to build them, Alexander says. With the right backup and networking arrangements, workloads can switch between sites if one loses power.

Its size also gives Saudi Arabia more scope to put substantial distance between data-center sites, potentially making them more resilient in the face of missile or drone attacks — though that doesn’t make them invulnerable. The UAE is also mulling breaking up its gargantuan, planned 5 GW AI campus into numerous data center clusters spread throughout the small country rather than a single 26 sq km campus in Abu Dhabi because of concerns about Iranian drone strikes. Both nations are also in the process of “hardening” data centers against future drone strikes.

The threat of physical attack has been top of mind in recent weeks as Houthi missile and drone strikes have hit airports in Riyadh and Dammam, the two cities where Humain’s first data centers are being built. Earlier in the war, Iranian drones struck and significantly damaged Amazon Web Services infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain.

But what if the AI bubble pops? If there’s a major correction that dramatically cuts the value of some US AI giants or even sends them out of business, that will obviously impact whichever sovereign wealth fund is most heavily invested in those companies. The UAE, which is most exposed to the broader US market, could take the biggest hit. Qatar’s overseas AI bets are concentrated in a few names, so its exposure is narrower. It has backed three sequential Anthropic rounds and recently invested in US AI infrastructure builder Crusoe.

But: Those nations’ sovereign wealth funds are so large and diversified — and so buoyed by oil wealth — that a temporary downturn is unlikely to cause lasting damage. Ultimately, the impact would depend on the size and concentration of each fund’s holdings, much of which has never been made public. A deflation of AI valuations could also present a buying opportunity for Gulf sovereigns convinced that the technology has long-term legs.

“These investments are meant to be intrinsically long-term in nature,” Vincent Carchidi (LinkedIn), a US defense industry analyst at Forecast International, tells EnterpriseAM. “They consider these to be laying the foundation for years and years of growth.”

There’s also the danger of a sharp drop in AI computing demand, which could impact data center projects in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but Mohammed Soliman (LinkedIn), a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, downplayed that danger. “Demand for AI infrastructure is so massive and this region is so completely underserved,” Soliman, who focuses on the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and business, tells EnterpriseAM. “There’s a customer for every single data center that’s going to be built.”