Saudi Arabia, rich with oil, wants to be known as the AI exporter

In northwest Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea, a planned $5 billion data centre would provide enough computing muscle for coders as far away as Europe to build artificial intelligence.

- ADAM SATARIANO & PAUL MOZUR

On the country’s opposite coast, another planned multibillion-dollar complex could be used by artificial intelliegence (AI) developers in Asia and Africa.

For generations, Saudi Arabia exported oil. Now it wants to export one of the digital era’s most coveted resources: computing power.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is seizing a chance to turn Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth into tech influence.

Already, Saudi Arabia has been negotiating with American tech giants about using its future datacentres and deepening their ties. Executives from OpenAl, Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Oracle are attending the country’s annual Future Investment Initiative conference that begins Monday, nicknamed Davos in the Desert.

One potential deal to provide computing power to Elon Musk’s xAI is close to being completed, said Saeed Al-Dobas, a senior executive at Humain, a new state-backed company coordinating many Al projects.

“Amazon was here yesterday. Microsoft we had this morning,” he said in an interview this month, adding that what was being negotiated with Musk was a “way, way bigger plan.”

Prince Mohammed created Humain in May and wants it to handle about 6 percent of the world’s Al workload in the coming years. That could take Saudi Arabia, which handles less than 1 percent now, from bit player to trailing only the United States and China in providing computing power, according to Synergy Research Group, which studies the data centre industry.