View / How Saudi Arabia can follow Israel’s AI blueprint

The launch of Humain, the artificial intelligence platform backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, has put AI at the center of the kingdom’s diversification strategy. With a supercomputer powered by 18,000 Blackwell GPUs from Nvidia, server CPUs from Qualcomm, a $10 billion collaboration with AMD, and a $10 billion partnership with Google Cloud to build a global AI hub in Dammam, Humain was birthed as one the world’s most important AI infrastructure providers.

It has plenty of company in the kingdom. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are all building huge computing and data centers in the kingdom.

While the country aims to become a top 15 player in the global AI ecosystem currently dominated by the US and China, its huge resources and impressive partners will not be enough. Without developing a thriving domestic community of data scientists and AI researchers, Saudi Arabia’s investments risk making it an outpost of the US economy. The intellectual property and the large revenues the infrastructure will generate will not be owned by Saudi Arabia, but by American and other foreign companies.

Saudi officials looking for an answer to this challenge can find it along the Red Sea coastline — in Israel.

Although Tel Aviv may be the last place Riyadh looks for lessons these days, Israel’s tech performance is worth emulating. And as the kingdom moves forward with plans to train 20,000 AI specialists by 2030, it can accelerate that effort by taking in Israel’s experience.

Israel, despite its small land mass and population, has the highest concentration of AI talent of any country in the world, according to the Stanford AI Index 2025. It was ranked fourth globally in AI startups from 2013-2024. The infrastructure that enables Nvidia to network its chips into an AI supercomputer was developed in Israel by Mellanox, a company founded by Eyal Waldman and sold to Nvidia in 2019 for $6.9 billion.

Ilya Sutskever’s, the Israeli-Canadian co-founder of Open AI, started Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross, another Israeli who as a teenager spent hours on the computers in my office. Last year, Safe Superintelligence raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation. In April, it raised another $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation — and it still has not publicly revealed much about itself beyond a broad and bold product statement about the need for the world’s first safe super intelligence.

Israel’s unique ecosystem attracts billions of dollars required to build AI technology and produce global startups. It has become a global tech leader not by leaning on oil or sovereign wealth, but by cultivating risk-taking, dual-use innovation, and a culture of entrepreneurship.

Saudi Arabia has its share of whip-smart, ambitious, hard-working, KPI-driven, creative, and fun-loving engineers and entrepreneurs. I’ve met them during my trips there. What they can benefit from is similar cooperation we are seeing in the UAE after its signed the Abraham Accords in 2020 — the country now hosts hundreds of Israeli engineers and startups helping to develop the Emirati economy.

The next phase of regional cooperation should go beyond diplomacy and into co-innovation. By learning from Israel’s agile innovation model and building joint AI initiatives, Saudi Arabia can supercharge its transformation while advancing broader regional prosperity.

If the Saudis can learn from Israel’s blueprint and build their capacity to train this next generation as Israel has, they will be able to transform their tech economy from a gracious host of US technology into a homegrown AI success.

Jon Medved is the founder and CEO of OurCrowd, a venture investment platform based in Jerusalem. Follow him on LinkedIn and X or subscribe to his weekly newsletter.