Europe's Elements

For decades, the global economy has quietly relied on a small group of metals that most people have never heard of – cerium, neodymium, praseodymium, and others that make up the 17 so-called rare earth elements.

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In the twentieth century, the Gulf's strategic relevance was distilled into a simple equation: oil in exchange for global influence and security guarantees. Today, that formula is being rewritten. The new commodity is not a liquid drawn from beneath the desert sands, but processing power – “compute” – driven by the most advanced chips and housed in sprawling data centres. The Gulf’s leaders have decided that if oil once powered the industrial economy, compute will fuel the digital one. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are now deploying their considerable sovereign wealth to buy a place at the top of the artificial intelligence value chain. Their approach is both straightforward and bold: build the infrastructure that global AI needs, partner with the most advanced technology providers, and make themselves indispensable to the world’s AI ambitions. In the UAE, this ambition has taken physical form in the Star-gate project, a colossal data infrastructure cluster designed to host AI training at scale. Such facilities, equipped with cutting-edge chips, are essential for developing and running frontier AI models. They are also in short supply globally. By positioning themselves as hosts of this critical infrastructure, Gulf states are creating a new kind of leverage, much as oil pipelines once did. Saudi Arabia is taking a similar route with its national AI company and plans for “AI factories” stocked with hundreds of thousands of high-end chips. These are not vanity projects. In a future where data, algorithms, and computing capacity determine technological and economic advantage, to own the infrastructure is to own a strategic resource. The timing is deliberate. The United States and China are locked in a contest for AI supremacy, and the Gulf has become a coveted partne