All the moves of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates in artificial intelligence
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are investing billions to establish themselves as regional AI leaders. Here are projects, strengths and weaknesses
When we talk about the champions of artificial intelligence (AI), our thoughts certainly do not go to the large desert areas of the Arabian Peninsula. But it is precisely there that two countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are investing billions to establish themselves as regional leaders of the most disruptive technology of the moment. Here's what Bloomberg writes about the AI race of two powers that have no shortage of resources to achieve their goals.
Arabia and the Emirates want autarky
The autarchic race of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates is not random. On the contrary, it is normal for a country to want to develop this technology within its borders to tighten the link between the services offered and local users.
Then there are the geopolitical reasons and in particular the need to store the data within its own servers, making them subject to local legislation and not to rules imposed from outside.
Saudi first
Becoming an AI leader is one of the objectives that the prime minister and heir to the Saudi throne Mohammed bin Salman has entrusted to Vision 2030 which aims to diversify the sources of income of a kingdom still too dependent on the sale of hydrocarbons.
Hence the opening of numerous large research centers which, with the support of multiple ministries, have already produced linguistic models very similar to those of OpenAI.
Emirates Go
But activities are also buzzing in the Emirates, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman showed up a few days ago to discuss with government officials and investors how the private sector can cooperate with the State in the creation of large-scale AI structures .
A river of money
There is no shortage of money. Last month Abu Dhabi launched an ad hoc investment fund of one hundred billion, while the very rich Saudi sovereign funds are in talks with the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz to allocate at least 40 billion.
Delay
At the moment the two countries are lagging behind Europe in terms of data centers: at the end of 2023 the Emirates boasted a capacity of 235 megawatts compared to 123 in Saudi Arabia and 1,060 in Germany according to data from the data center DC Byte search.
To fill the gap, the Emirates now aim to expand capacity by 343 megawatts while the Saudis work to add 467 in the next few years.
Investments with a safe return
The stakes are really high: according to estimates provided in a PwC report , by 2030 AI will contribute 96 billion dollars to the economy of the Emirates and 135 to that of Saudi Arabia, placing the two countries behind only China and North America as regions where AI will have the greatest impact on GDP.
Emirates full speed ahead
Despite their smaller size, the Emirates are at an advantage, having started building data centers more than twenty years ago, to the point that today they have 52 operational.
Coordinating the efforts is a technology conglomerate called G42 that is chaired by the national security adviser. G42 is working in tandem with California startup Cerebras Systems to develop custom chips similar to those produced by Nvidia. Another G42 partner is Microsoft, which provides the servers.
Arabia a step behind, but…
Despite boasting 60 data centers on its territory, Saudi Arabia can rely on less computing capacity in a gap that will soon be made up thanks to partnerships with giants such as Alibaba and Tencent.
The latest to enter the game was Amazon which has just invested 10 billion in Saudi data centers.
Advantage and Achilles heel
Yet those multinationals that are investing in the country today are the same ones that in the past ended up at the center of controversy among civic organizations for their desire to adhere to a local system of rules considered harmful to human rights.
It is no coincidence that Anthropic PBC has refused to participate in activities in the kingdom due to this same concern.
Technical obstacles
However, there is a problem inherent to the very territory in which these projects are being developed. In fact, servers use a lot of energy, which often leads to overheating of the equipment, even causing blackouts and damage.
For this reason, new approaches are being tried such as liquid cooling, which intervenes directly on the equipment without requiring cooling of the surrounding area.
But the scorching temperatures of these latitudes have not discouraged Equinix from building a newly opened facility on a site where the summer thermometer reaches 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The company has already started working on the construction of a second center not far away.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/intelligenza-artificiale-arabia-saudita-emirati-arabi-uniti/ on Sun, 14 Apr 2024 06:15:05 +0000.