The Gulf’s oil-rich states, betting billions on reinventing themselves as centers of artificial intelligence, are discovering that money can buy almost everything, except a way out of Nvidia.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have committed tens of billions of dollars to becoming AI powers before the oil money fades. For the past year, they have tried to buy chips from as many companies as they can, so that no single supplier controls how much they pay and how fast they can build.
But they are running into a wall, because the few alternatives to Nvidia are either far weaker or, in China’s case, blocked by the U.S.
“Diversification away from Nvidia reduces the Gulf’s dependence on any one commercial vendor, but it doesn’t change the political risk of dependence on the U.S. at all,” Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who studies the geopolitics of chips, told Rest of World. “What would change that is Chinese supply, but China cannot yet export competitive chips at scale, and the U.S. has made the Gulf’s access to U.S. AI tech conditional on keeping Chinese hardware out.”
Saudi Arabia agreed on June 1 to use self-driving taxis that run on Nvidia technology — from the computer inside each car to the software that steers it. The deal with the U.S. chipmaker was struck by Humain, the venture set up by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund last year to make the kingdom a global AI power. Humain is also building data centers in Riyadh and Dammam, powered by several hundred thousand Nvidia chips.
