AI is making Middle East infrastructure easier to hack

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The Pitch

What’s the MENA stake as Trump and Xi sit down with AI leaders?

Happy Thursday, everyone! And happy National Punctuation Day (in the United States) to those who celebrate. Also to those who CELEBRATE!!! Okay, let’s get going.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall: US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be dining at the White House tonight with tech leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos, and the chief executives of Google, Meta, and Nvidia — basically a who’s who of the folks deciding the fate of the human race. Notable absence: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company has a checkered history with the Trump administration.

What’s up for serious discussion:

US tech companies are pushing for a deal that reverses limits China has put on exporting rare earth materials that are vital components of computer chips, electric vehicles, defense systems, and other technologies. China imposed a first set of export controls in 2025 and another round is set to take effect in November. Here’s more from The New York Times.
Trump is also under pressure from Congress — especially Democrats — to curtail the sale of US-built AI chips to China. The Trump administration struck a deal in December to sell Nvidia’s second-most-advanced AI chips to China — though China isn’t buying many of them. China has also been developing its own chip supply chain, so it’s less dependent on the US for the raw materials of AI.

What’s not up for serious discussion: Don’t expect any breakthroughs on calls from Amodei and other AI executives — some of whom are attending the dinner — to “pace the AI frontier.” In other words, to slow down developments until we’re reasonably confident that the most advanced AI models won’t end life as we know it.

Some rare common ground? Trump and Xi have both planted a flag in opposition to the calls for a slowdown. Trump called fears that AI advances could endanger humanity a “hoax.” Chinese state media dismissed the calls as “Cold War tactics" by the US, mostly because of proposed limits on chip sales to China.

Here’s how Trump put it during a minorly unhinged address at the UN this week: “We’re leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way.”

The Gulf angle: The best case scenario for Gulf leaders may be a US-China meeting that doesn’t produce any big new agreement — but doesn’t produce any fireworks either. Gulf nations have mostly managed to tread a middle path on AI — working with both the US and China — and profited handsomely from it. (The UAE has hewed closest to the US, agreeing to decouple its AI stack from China. But it’s also gotten the most rewards — license-free access to top-of-the-line AI chips for approved companies, including G42 and Core42).

The result is an investment portfolio and a tech stack that’s deeply dependent on both nations continuing to innovate and make money from AI and other advanced technology. “Ultimately the Emiratis want connectivity. They want to be the compute bridge to support American companies and Chinese companies,” Nick Shafer (LinkedIn), an emerging markets strategist focused on MENA and technology and an adjunct faculty member at the University of California-Berkeley, tells EnterpriseAM.

Microsoft’s plan to spend USD 10 bn in the Gulf through 2030 is the biggest new foreign commitments to the region since the Iran war kicked off

Microsoft plans to spend more than USD 10 bn across the Gulf before 2030, the company said, expanding its total outlay on running and expanding its cloud and AI investments despite the Iran war. That sum, including about USD 2 bn more than the tech giant had previously committed to spending here in this period, is one of the largest foreign commitments to building tech infrastructure in the region since the conflict began in February 2026.

Details: The spending will be spread across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait and go to AI and cloud infrastructure among other things, Reuters reports. The figure is total outlay — including operating expenditures and capital invested through 2030. Microsoft is committing c. USD 2 bn more than it had originally earmarked for the Gulf in this period, Bloomberg notes.

Microsoft’s gamble: Allocating fresh capital to the region essentially signals that Microsoft believes the Gulf’s AI future is just as promising now as it was before the war began. In March, Iranian drones damaged two Amazon data centers in the UAE and another in Bahrain. There have been no known attacks against tech infrastructure since then, though the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has argued that they are fair game.

The pledge: “We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we’re in fact adding to them…It’s an aggressive spending schedule,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told Reuters.

But things may never be quite the same: Gulf AI officials have tried to project that everything is business as usual since the war started — but they’ve also adapted to the changed threat environment, announcing plans to “harden” data centers and other infrastructure against future attacks. The UAE’s AI champion G42 is reportedly considering revamping its flagship project to be a cluster of data centers spread across the country rather than a single 26 sq km campus in Abu Dhabi.

AI leaders urge global rules at the UN Security Council

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged global standards for AI at the UN Security Council Wednesday — putting an international cap on weeks of hand wringing about the perils of AI among its top practitioners.

The details: Amodei urged the Security Council, which was meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, to start by supporting a global ban on using AI to make biological weapons and to adopt common standards for testing AI models and flagging misuses that are “significant to global security,” per CNN.

Amodei’s take: “I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today,” the Anthropic boss told world leaders. “If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.”

And Altman’s: “It doesn’t matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10% or 1% or 12% or 0.1%. None of these levels are remotely acceptable.”

Good luck with that: As noted above, the US and China have both resisted calls for global rules of the road on AI, making any Security Council action likely impossible.

Even the lowest-hanging fruit: During the Biden administration, the US and China did agree to the seemingly glaringly obvious proposition that AI should not be put in charge of nuclear weapons. Even that agreement took “more than a year” to negotiate, according to Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Also at UNGA: The royal family-linked Emirates Foundation announced a partnership with the Responsible AI Future Foundation (RAIFF) aimed at ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly shared, according to a news release.

Major focus areas include: Responsible AI governance, AI capacity building and education, and “AI initiatives designed to create a positive social impact in the UAE, the Middle East, and the Global South,” per the release, which was short on specifics. RAIFF is a partnership between G42, Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, and Microsoft.

OpenAI disclosed even more rogue AI hacks this week

OpenAI acknowledged a slew of instances this week in which its models tried to hack government and university websites — deepening concern that humans cannot control the technology’s bad behavior.

It sure looks like a pattern: The hacking incidents were all relatively minor on their own, but collectively paint a picture of an industry that hasn’t figured out how to make its technology adhere to even basic rules and laws. The incidents took place in May and June, before the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack supercharged the debate about AI safety, The New York Times reports.

Significantly, the models in this case weren’t asked to hack anything. They were just given data collection tasks and resorted to hacking when they couldn’t find what they wanted through legal means.

The victims include: An Australian government website, a digital library at the University of New Mexico, and a data repository with information about US employment and education.

Google takes flight and the Pope doubles down on AI doomerism

Far out: Google is taking the first steps toward building AI data centers in space where they can be more easily powered by solar energy, per The New York Times. The project “faces many challenges, including withstanding radiation in space and the costs of getting machines beyond the atmosphere,” the Times reports. “Yet as data centers grapple with terrestrial opposition and physical limits, having computing facilities float above Earth has become increasingly attractive.”

It all adds up: OpenAI says it’s creating a math advisory board to give mathematicians more input into the company’s math research as it attempts, and often succeeds, in solving some of the world’s most bedeviling math problems. Here’s more from TechCrunch.

A papal warning: Pope Leo plans to renew his warnings about the dangers of mismanaged AI tomorrow during an address at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, Reuters reports. The Pope urged global leaders back in May to create international rules for AI. He has warned specifically about the dangers of AI-run autonomous weapons, misinformation and mass unemployment.

Set in the Vatican: Vatican City can’t compete with Rome or Vienna for great movie scenes, but it’s no slouch either. There’s 2024’s Conclave, of course, which was basically a political thriller about picking a new pope, and Charlton Heston as Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in The Agony and the Ecstasy. But it’s tough to beat Michael Corleone’s confession to Cardinal Lamberto (later Pope John Paul I) in The Godfather Part III. Spoiler alert: His sins extend far beyond a shady business deal with International Immobiliare.

That’s it for today! Thanks for reading — we’ll be back in your inbox Tuesday. Stay in touch at [email protected].

CALENDAR

September 2026

26-27 September (Saturday-Sunday): Techne Summit brings startup-focused AI programming to New Cairo.

29 September (Tuesday): OpenAI holds its DevDay developer conference in San Francisco, its usual venue for major model and agent-tooling announcements.

October 2026

3-5 October (Saturday-Monday): Techne Summit’s Alexandria edition runs at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

5 October (Monday): EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum: The AI Edition in Cairo.

6-7 October (Tuesday-Wednesday): AI Everything Abu Dhabi, billed as the world's largest AI-first expo, opens at ADNEC.

11-13 October (Sunday-Tuesday): Riyadh’s King Salman Center for Disability Research runs an AI hackathon for people with disabilities, sponsored by Boeing Saudi Arabia.

26-27 October (Monday-Tuesday): The Dubai AI Festival returns as part of Dubai AI Week.

26-29 October (Monday-Thursday): Riyadh hosts its annual Future Investment Initiative under the theme “The Power of Legacy” with a heavy AI-investment track.

27 October (Tuesday): Alphabet reports Q3 earnings after the US market closes, with AI capex and Gemini / cloud growth as the headline watch items.

27 October (Tuesday): Microsoft reports fiscal Q1 2027 earnings after the US market closes, including Azure and OpenAI-partnership capex disclosures.

28 October (Wednesday): Meta reports Q3 earnings, with AI infrastructure spend in focus.

29 October (Thursday): Amazon reports Q3 earnings, including AWS and Bedrock AI growth.

30 October (Friday): UAE businesses earning over AED 50 mn a year must have an accredited e-invoicing provider in place by this date.

November 2026

18-19 November (Wednesday-Thursday): The Global AI Show is scheduled to open in Abu Dhabi.

7-10 November (Saturday-Tuesday): Cairo ICT runs in New Cairo alongside AIDC Expo, its dedicated AI, data center, and cloud event.

17-19 November (Tuesday-Thursday): Bengaluru Tech Summit brings businesses, startups, researchers, and policymakers to Bengaluru, India, under the theme “AI & Beyond.”

17-20 November (Tuesday-Friday): Microsoft Ignite runs in San Francisco and online, covering Microsoft’s AI, cloud, security, and data products.

18-19 November (Wednesday-Thursday): Global AI Show opens at Space42 Arena in Abu Dhabi, with enterprise AI, computing capacity, and sovereign AI on the agenda.

30 November-4 December (Monday-Friday): AWS re brings Amazon’s cloud and AI conference to Las Vegas, with product announcements and sessions on deployment, costs, and security.

December 2026

1-3 December (Tuesday-Thursday): Black Hat MEA brings cybersecurity leaders, researchers, and technology companies to Malham, Riyadh.

6-12 December (Sunday-Saturday): NeurIPS holds its main AI research conference in Sydney, offering a look at advances that could shape the next generation of commercial AI.

7-11 December (Monday-Friday): GITEX Global opens with a leadership summit at Dubai World Trade Centre on 7 December, followed by its exhibition at Expo City Dubai on 8-11 December.

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