Nvidia's Free AI Model Targets UAE to Counter China — SkimNews
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- Nvidia spent $7 billion on a stake in coding startup Poolside and licensed its model-building tools; the resulting free model, expected to be called Nemotron 4, is due by year's end for anyone to download.
- G42, the UAE's state-backed AI company, shed its Chinese stakes to secure Nvidia's most advanced chips and was the only Gulf company to join Nvidia's July alliance championing open-weight, sovereign-controllable models.
- The UAE's Technology Innovation Institute insists on building Falcon from scratch — it topped Counterpoint's 2025 index of state-backed models — creating a split with G42 over whether to build or license the model layer.
- Chinese free models were downloaded roughly 2 billion times this year on Hugging Face, far ahead of any Western rival, prompting Nvidia's separate, nearly $13 billion deal to acquire the platform and seed Nemotron as the default base.
- Saudi Arabia, competing with the UAE for regional AI-hub status, commissioned an Arabic model from a Chinese lab this month even while purchasing tens of thousands of Nvidia chips.
- The U.S. approved sales of Nvidia's most advanced chips to the UAE after G42 cut Chinese ties two years ago, and in July placed the country in its group of closest technology allies.
Why it matters: The UAE's 400,000-chip data center gives Nvidia a captive Gulf footprint at the moment Chinese open-source models are pulling ahead on raw downloads (2 billion this year). But with Saudi Arabia running Chinese models on American chips and the UAE's TII refusing to abandon its homegrown Falcon, Gulf states are hedging rather than locking into either stack outright.
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