Nada Salam
For years, the question in the Gulf was how artificial intelligence could be used. Today, the question is becoming much bigger: Where will the computing power behind AI be located, and who will control it?
That shift explains the accelerating race between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Competition has moved beyond applications and investments in technology companies toward massive data centers and AI factories consuming as much electricity as entire cities.
Abu Dhabi appears to have taken an early lead.
The Stargate UAE project includes a one-gigawatt computing cluster within a broader U.S.-UAE AI campus planned to reach five gigawatts, with the first 200 megawatts expected to come online in 2026.
Saudi Arabia is moving in the same direction. HUMAIN, backed by the Public Investment Fund, is working with Nvidia on AI factories with planned capacity of up to 500 megawatts, beginning with 18,000 advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell chips.
The numbers reveal what the next phase of AI competition will look like.
The Gulf possesses three things the AI economy increasingly needs: capital, energy and the ability to execute enormous infrastructure projects quickly.
That advantage becomes more important as data-center development in the United States encounters power-grid constraints, environmental scrutiny and local opposition. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, by contrast, can allocate land, electricity and financing and move projects forward at considerable speed.
Gulf capital is also beginning to treat AI infrastructure as a global investment class. Kuwait Investment Authority, for example, joined an infrastructure partnership involving MGX, Microsoft, BlackRock and Global Infrastructure Partners.
But owning data centers is not the same as owning the technology.
This is the central paradox of the Gulf’s AI ambitions.
The land is Gulf-owned. The energy is Gulf-produced. An increasing share of the capital is Gulf-based. Yet the most advanced chips, major AI models and essential cloud-computing platforms remain predominantly American. Access to some of that technology also remains subject to U.S. export controls.
That makes the idea of “AI sovereignty” more complicated than it sounds.
The Gulf could become one of the world’s most important locations for building and operating AI infrastructure without becoming technologically independent.
With global data-center electricity consumption projected to reach roughly 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, the next AI competition will not simply be about who develops the best model.
It will increasingly be about electricity, chips, land and computing capacity.
The Gulf recognized that early.
What began as a race to acquire technology is becoming a race to own the infrastructure where that technology will run.