Tech giants Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta to collectively invest $600bn on artificial intelligence this year
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Today in tech, we’re discussing the Persian Gulf countries making a play for sovereignty over their own artificial intelligence in response to an unstable United States. That, and US tech giants’ plans to spend more than $600bn this year alone.
I spent most of last week in Doha at the Web Summit Qatar, the Persian Gulf’s new version of the popular annual tech conference. One theme stood out among the speeches I watched and the conversations I had: sovereignty.
The conference’s founder set the Summit’s tone on opening night: “Three years ago [when Web Summit Qatar began], people were talking about entering a multi-polar world. We are now living in a multi-polar world,” said Paddy Cosgrave.
As evidence, he referenced the fiery rebuke of Donald Trump given by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, at Davos a few weeks prior. He pointed to the act that had preceded him on stage: dancing robots built by a Chinese company, which he called the most advanced in the world. Cosgrave also brought on two speakers who would act out the dynamics he had mentioned. First was the Qatari prime minister, who announced a series of billion-dollar moves meant to foster startups in the country. Then came the Palestinian-Jordanian founder of UpScrolled, an insurgent TikTok competitor whose founder announced on stage that the app had crossed 2.5 million users amid the confused backlash to the new US entity of TikTok.
