Attendees at the Leap technology conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 6, 2024. The oil-rich country is plowing money into glitzy events, computing power and artificial intelligence research, putting it in the middle of an escalating U.S.-China struggle for technological influence.
“This is a great country,” Shou Chew, TikTok’s CEO, said during the conference, heralding the video app’s growth in the kingdom. “We expect to invest even more.” For the tech industry, Saudi Arabia has long been a funding spigot. But the kingdom is now redirecting its oil wealth into building a domestic tech industry, requiring international firms to establish roots there if they want its money.
For China, the Persian Gulf region offers a big market, access to deep-pocketed investors and a chance to wield influence in countries traditionally allied with the United States. China’s form of AI-powered surveillance has already been embedded into policing in the region. “There’s something happening here,” said Hilmar Veigar Petursson, the CEO of CCP Games, the Icelandic company behind the popular game Eve Online, who was at the gala. “I got a very similar sense when I came back from China in 2005.”Crown Prince Mohammed’s Vision 2030 project, unveiled eight years ago, seems taken from a science-fiction script.
For a brief period, it was seen as untoward to associate with Saudi Arabia. Business executives canceled visits to the kingdom. But the lure of its money was ultimately too strong. Those goals have permeated the kingdom. Posters for Vision 2030 are visible throughout Riyadh. Young Saudis describe the crown prince as running the kingdom as if it were a startup. Many tech leaders have parroted the sentiment.
The university, known as KAUST, is central to Saudi Arabia’s plans to vault to AI leadership. Modeled on universities like the California Institute of Technology, KAUST has brought in foreign AI leaders and provided computing resources to build an epicenter for AI research. Schmidhuber, the researcher leading KAUST’s AI efforts, has seen the jostling up close. Considered a pioneer of modern AI — students in a lab he led included a founder of DeepMind, an innovative AI company now owned by Google — he was lured to the desert in 2021.
A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the default U.S. policy was to share technology with Saudi Arabia, a critical ally in the Persian Gulf, but that there were national security concerns and risks with AI.