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 Stargate project, a colossal........

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