Saudi Arabia and UAE Play Both Sides in Emerging AI Power Struggle

Saudi Arabia is building a massive AI ecosystem that blends U.S. hardware with Chinese software, a strategy highlighted at Riyadh’s recent LEAP conference where HUMAIN introduced Arabic AI based on China’s MiniMax model. While Amazon Web Services has pledged $5.3 billion for Saudi data centers, the kingdom also welcomes Chinese partners like ByteDance’s cloud unit and Tencent Cloud, which have secured operating licenses.

Lenovo has begun producing laptops locally, and DataVolt is erecting a $1 billion, 100-megawatt compute plant in NEOM with plans to expand to 360 megawatts. By leveraging abundant capital, energy, and land, Saudi Arabia aims to own a share of the infrastructure that runs global AI models, extracting investment and technology transfers from both Washington and Beijing. The approach mirrors the Gulf’s historic use of energy leverage, now applied to compute power, and could reshape the AI competition into a Cold-War-style contest with swing states influencing both sides.