Gulf states pour billions into AI, stay locked to Nvidia
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- Saudi Arabia agreed June 1 to deploy Nvidia-powered self-driving taxis through Humain, its Public Investment Fund-backed AI venture, which is also building data centers in Riyadh and Dammam powered by several hundred thousand Nvidia chips.
- UAE's G42 is building the Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi with a first stage running on 400,000 Nvidia chips; CEO Peng Xiao said in January that the machines inside would be "mostly" Nvidia.
- Nvidia's data center business hit a record $51.2 billion in the quarter ending October, up 66% year-over-year, and its newest Blackwell architecture line is "sold out," per the company's earnings report.
- Humain placed an initial order of 18,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips for training and struck deals with AMD ($10 billion for 500 megawatts), Groq ($2 billion), and Qualcomm (200 megawatts) — but analysts said those rivals only handle narrower inference tasks, not frontier model training.
- Nvidia's CUDA platform, used by more than 4 million developers after nearly two decades of investment, creates a lock-in so deep that AMD and Qualcomm depend on the same TSMC foundry capacity and specialized high-speed memory further down the supply chain.
- Mohammed Soliman of the Middle East Institute told Rest of World that "true technological sovereignty in artificial intelligence is… effectively unattainable" for nearly every country outside the US and China, even for Europe with its industrial base and capital markets.
- Washington has made Gulf access to top US chips conditional on keeping Chinese hardware out, and China's best chips trail Nvidia's by at least a generation while its own companies absorb most domestic supply, per Carnegie analyst Sam Winter-Levy.
Why it matters: The Gulf's experience exposes a hard limit: tens of billions and sovereign wealth cannot buy AI independence when US hyperscalers also tap infinite capital, and TSMC capacity plus high-bandwidth memory remain the real chokepoints. Per Mohammed Soliman, Gulf leaders are "AI realists" choosing deeper integration with US tech over an unattainable sovereignty dream — accelerating the concentration of frontier AI capability in American hands.
