View / Everyone expects two AI blocs. The Gulf is betting on both

Saudi Arabia is building enormous AI infrastructure, partnering with US firms and using American chips — AWS alone has committed $5.3 billion to data centers in the kingdom. Yet at Riyadh’s LEAP conference this month, state-backed HUMAIN unveiled Arabic technology built on a model from China’s MiniMax.

While this may seem as a contradiction, it’s more accurate to view it as a strategy.

The conventional view of the AI race splits the world into two blocs: the US, with Nvidia, the hyperscalers, and most of the leading frontier labs, on one side; and China, with its own models, engineering capacity, and increasingly competitive stack, on the other. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf countries don’t need to replicate either ecosystem. Their value may lie in being among the few places where both can operate at once.

The Gulf has obvious advantages such as capital, energy, and land. The less obvious one is geopolitical flexibility. Saudi Arabia is showing what that looks like in practice. HUMAIN is building its infrastructure with American technology and has agreed that Chinese frontier models won’t be trained on computing capacity it obtains through US export approvals. At the same time, it keeps its relationships with Chinese firms open. Beyond the MiniMax deal, ByteDance’s cloud arm is building infrastructure in Riyadh, Tencent Cloud has secured a Saudi operating license, and Lenovo has already rolled its first “Made in Saudi Arabia” laptop.

The strategy stems from a simple calculation. American restrictions push Riyadh toward Chinese alternatives, and Chinese shortfalls in frontier performance push it back toward Washington. In the end, both sides end up competing for something the Gulf increasingly controls: AI infrastructure.

AI may feel like software, but in many ways, it’s more like heavy industry, with enormous data centers, electricity, cooling, land, and capital. Saudi Arabia has all of it. DataVolt is already constructing a roughly $1 billion, 100-megawatt facility at NEOM designed to export compute, with ambitions to expand to 360 megawatts.

This allows Saudi Arabia to compete globally not by inventing the best chip or training the best model. The kingdom can own a growing share of the infrastructure everyone else’s models runs on, and use access to that infrastructure to extract investment, localization commitments, and technology transfer.

If Washington insists on treating access to chips as a foreign policy tool and Beijing uses open models to penetrate markets its hardware can’t access, Saudi Arabia and Gulf states will follow their own interests, which is not to choose between either side, and the AI competition may look more like the Cold War than expected. Rather than two sealed blocs, it could produce a handful of swing states able to play both sides, extracting economic and strategic benefits as Washington and Beijing compete for their allegiance.

The Gulf spent decades learning to turn control over energy into geopolitical leverage. It’s now applying the same playbook to compute.

Judah Taub is the founder and managing partner of Hetz Ventures, an Israeli early-stage venture capital firm specializing in cybersecurity, data, and AI infrastructure.