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Saudi Arabia And UAE Join The Global Rush For AI Dominance

As operational expenses for AI soar, the race is on to purchase as many high-performance Nvidia chips as possible.

Published

3 years ago

August 16, 2023

saudi arabia and uae join the global rush for ai dominance

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are now part of the global race to buy up thousands of Nvidia A100 and H100 chips, two of the company’s high-performance processors, due to their pivotal role in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) development.

The Nvidia H100 chip, with a massive price tag of $40,000, is the world’s first processor designed specifically for GenAI. Saudi Arabia already has a stash of over 3,000 of the chips at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Meanwhile, the UAE has access to thousands of Nvidia processors and has even developed a unique large language model, known as Falcon, at the Technology Innovation Institute.

The ongoing global chip shortage is contributing to the scarcity and pricing of the processors, and the total cost for server infrastructure is expected to exceed $76 billion by 2028. OpenAI, the leading player in the field, currently runs ChatGPT on a cloud infrastructure costing millions of dollars per day to run. At the same time, the massive amounts of computing power required by these AI systems is also responsible for driving up energy consumption and other related expenses.

Also Read: Dubai Community Launches AI-Powered Pedestrian Crossings

The global scramble for high-performance Nvidia chips reflects AI’s pivotal role in shaping modern, digital-first economies. The ambitions of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to play leading roles in AI development come at significant financial costs and underscore the need for highly efficient computing methods. The development of AI involves not only scientific innovation but also careful attention to the ethical and environmental implications of the technology.

One thing is for sure: As the AI arms race gathers pace, striking a balance between technological advancement and social and environmental responsibility will become paramount.

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Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict

Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.

Published

4 days ago

September 24, 2026

Nour Nasir

Microsoft

Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.

“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.

The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.

The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.

Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.

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The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.

So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.