Nvidia's free AI model targets UAE to counter China's lead — SkimNews
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- Nvidia spent $7 billion last month to buy a stake in Poolside and license its model-building tools, with a free model expected by year's end that targets buyers already running Nvidia hardware.
- The UAE is the prime target, with a flagship data center running on 400,000 Nvidia chips and state-backed G42 cutting its Chinese ties two years ago to secure those chips — it then became the only Gulf company to join Nvidia's open-model alliance in July.
- The Technology Innovation Institute insists on building from scratch, producing the Falcon model that now ranks first on Counterpoint's index of state-backed models, and rejects full reliance on Nvidia's open weights.
- Saudi Arabia's Humain introduced an Arabic model commissioned from a Chinese lab this month while running on cleared-to-buy U.S. Nvidia chips, a hedging pattern one Carnegie analyst called 'little full-stack lock-in.'
- Nvidia has also agreed to pay almost $13 billion to acquire Hugging Face, where Chinese open models were downloaded roughly 2 billion times this year — eight times more than any Western rival — as it works to make Nemotron the default base layer governments build on.
Why it matters: Nvidia is committing roughly $20 billion across Poolside and Hugging Face to move competition from chips into the open-model layer, where China currently dominates with 2 billion downloads this year. If Nemotron becomes the base for Gulf state AI, U.S. technology standards get embedded across the region's infrastructure while Chinese alternatives lose ground in a market that already imports hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips.
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