RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — One day in March, technology executives, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other companies were stuck in a three-hour traffic jam as their cars circled toward a huge conference in a space for events in the desert, 80 kilometers outside Riyadh.
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The lure: billions of dollars in Saudi money as the kingdom seeks to build a technology industry to complement its oil dominance.
“To the future,” said a sign at the entrance to the event, called Leap. More than 200,000 people attended, including Adam Selipsky, head of Amazon’s cloud computing division, who announced a $5.3 billion investment in Saudi Arabia for data centers and artificial intelligence technology. Arvind Krishna, director of IBM, spoke of friendship. Executives from Huawei and dozens of other companies gave speeches. Deals worth more than $10 billion were struck there, Saudi Arabia’s state press agency said.
“This is a great country,” said Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, announcing the growth of the video app in the kingdom. “We anticipate investing even more.”
Everyone in tech seems to want to make friends with Saudi Arabia, as the kingdom aims to become a dominant player in the field of AI — and is pumping in impressive sums to do so.
Saudi Arabia this year created a $100 billion fund to invest in AI and other technologies. It is in talks with Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and others to invest $40 billion more in AI companies. In March, the Government said it would invest $1 billion in a startup accelerator to attract AI entrepreneurs.
The spending explosion stems from a generational effort outlined in 2016 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and known as “Vision 2030.” Saudi Arabia is diversifying its oil-rich economy into technology, tourism, culture and sports — investing about $200 million a year for soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and planning a 100-mile-long mirrored skyscraper as part of a megacity in the desert.
If Prince Mohammed succeeds in building a domestic tech industry, he will put Saudi Arabia in the middle of a global competition between China, the United States and other countries like France that have made progress in generative AI. Combined with AI efforts from its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia hopes to create a new power center.
The Prince’s ambitions are geopolitically sensitive, as China and the United States seek to create spheres of influence over AI. In Washington, many worry that the kingdom’s authoritarian goals and inclinations could work against American interests — for example, if Saudi Arabia ends up providing computing power to Chinese researchers and companies.
For China, the Persian Gulf region offers a large market, access to deep-pocketed investors and the opportunity to exert influence in countries allied with the United States.
Some industry leaders have started arriving. Jürgen Schmidhuber, an artificial intelligence pioneer who now heads an AI program at Saudi Arabia’s top research university, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, recalled the kingdom’s roots centuries ago as a center of science and mathematics.
“It would be wonderful to contribute to a new world and resurrect this golden age,” he said. “Yes, it will cost money, but there is a lot of money in this Country.”
Under Vision 2030, new futuristic cities will be built in the desert along the Red Sea, oriented around technology and digital services. When Prince Mohammed visited California in 2018, Google co-founder Sergey Brin accompanied him around the company’s campus. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, showed him the company’s products. The Prince also traveled to Seattle, Washington, where he met with Microsoft’s Bill Gates; Satya Nadella, CEO of the company; and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
It was a key moment for Saudi Arabia’s technological ambitions as Prince Mohammed presented himself as a young, digitally savvy reformer. But enthusiasm faded a few months later when Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of the crown prince, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Prince Mohammed denied his involvement, but the CIA concluded that he had approved the assassination.
For a brief period, it was considered inconvenient to have contact with Saudi Arabia. Business executives canceled visits. But in the end the lure of his money proved too strong.
The development of AI depends on two key things that Saudi Arabia has in abundance: money and energy. The kingdom is investing oil profits in buying semiconductors, building supercomputers, attracting talent and building data centers powered by its abundant electricity. The bet is that Saudi Arabia will eventually export AI computing muscle.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, located next to the turquoise waters of the Red Sea, has become the site of the technological showdown between the United States and China.
The university, known as KAUST, is key to Saudi Arabia’s plans to achieve leadership in AI. KAUST, created in the image of universities such as the California Institute of Technology, has brought in foreign leaders in artificial intelligence and provided computational resources to build an epicenter for AI research.
To achieve that goal, KAUST has often turned to China to recruit students and faculty, alarming U.S. officials. They fear that students and professors at Chinese universities linked to the military will use KAUST to circumvent US sanctions and boost China in the race for AI supremacy, US officials and analysts said.
Particularly worrying is the university’s construction of one of the fastest supercomputers in the region, which requires thousands of microchips made by Nvidia, in Santa Clara, California, the largest manufacturer of the precious chips that power artificial intelligence systems. . The university’s chip order, estimated to be worth more than $100 million, is delayed by a review by the U.S. government, which must provide an export permit before the sale can take place.
Both China and the United States want to keep Prince Mohammed close. The United States has pressured Saudi Arabia to choose sides, but Prince Mohammed seems content to benefit from both nations.
Schmidhuber has witnessed the crashes. Considered a pioneer of modern AI—among the students of a lab he ran was the founder of DeepMind, an innovative AI company now owned by Google—he was lured to the desert in 2021.
He was reluctant to move at first, he said, but the university “tried to make it more attractive, and even more attractive, and even more attractive to me.” Now Schmidhuber is waiting for the Shaheen 3 supercomputer to be completed, which is an opportunity to attract more top talent to the Persian Gulf and give researchers access to computing power often reserved for large companies.
“No other university will have anything similar,” he said.
Still, Schmidhuber said the Saudi government was ultimately aligned with the United States. Just as American technology helped create Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, it will play a critical role in the development of artificial intelligence.
“No one wants to jeopardize that,” he said.
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