MN Regions Briefing | GCC-MENA: How the Gulf is Rewriting Power in the Digital Age

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I'm Nisa Bardin, and welcome to Regions Briefings. We examine what's happening across different regions, recent events on the ground, and explain their significance for people, highlighting the power dynamics at play. And all this ties into middle nations three goals, which is psychological decolonization, economic sovereignty, and political independence for Muslims. Now joining me today is sister Samira, our MENA regions lead, who has been closely tracking political, economic, and security developments across the region. Sister Samira, welcome once again to another episode of Maroon Nations regions three things.

I'd like us to jump straight into it. When we talk about artificial intelligence in The Gulf today, are we really talking about technology, or are we talking about a new foundation for sovereignty, power, and autonomy?

Sister Nisa. Thank you so much for having me for this month's region's briefing. So what I want to talk about today in this briefing is the story about how AI is becoming, you know, the new pillar, the pillar for, you know, economic sovereignty, the the the three things that we always stress on in middle nation, economic sovereignty, political independence, and psychological decolonization, especially in the GCC region. So AI is no longer just a commercial technology that we only see in ads or we use. It's it's becoming really a state infrastructure.

And states that control the AI infrastructure will be shaping the new phase of the global order. So to in this briefing, I have organized them into the three objectives as we mentioned before, economic sovereignty, political independence, and psychological decolonization. So let me begin with the context first because it's important to note that what I'm gonna be talking about will be is is mostly from the World Bank's Gulf Economic Update, which was released in this month, December 2025, and specifically the The Gulf's digital transformation, this is the title, which provides a baseline for understanding where the GCC stands today. So this report, it shows that despite years of diversification efforts, you know, the the non hydrocarbon transformations that has been across the region, it has been uneven. And growth outside the oil exists, but it remained fragile and, you know, uneven, and and it was quite exposed to the global shocks.

So what is new and what the report makes clear is that the digital infrastructure and architecture sorry, the AI, they are now the central theme or the central diversification strategies for this region. And and it's now it's no longer the site sector or whatever, but it's just a foundational layer at this moment, and that is the shift. That's the shift that is currently happening in the region. So in earlier decades let me just yeah. In earlier decades, diversification meant tourism.

So they used to diversify in tourism, in logistics, in finance, in manufacturing. But today, the diversification is becoming more into the compute industry because AI is is is not just software. AI is it's a lot of investment. It's energy intensive, infrastructure heavy, and it depends on data centers, cloud capacity, depends on chips, and depends on super computers, and and and, of course, the labor. The the the highly trained labors.

So that makes AI fundamentally different from any earlier technology waves.

Diversification has been the gold stated goal for decades. What is fundamentally different about AI compared to earlier diversification strategies?

Right. So when we talk about economic sovereignty, it's basically the ability of a state to generate value internally or locally and and the the core the control of these strategic sectors and to reduce them, the exposure to external shocks. So that's what economic sovereignty is. So for for decades, the GCC economies were sovereign in revenue. Right?

So they were getting revenues from the hydrocarbons and all that, but they were dependent in structure. So because of their reliance on the hydrocarbons, on the imported technologies, and the foreign expertise. AI now represents an attempt to break from that pattern. So it's an attempt to break away from all these reliances. Similar thing in twin in the twentieth century, the oil provided that capacity for the GCC.

But in this twenty first century, compute is becoming an additional pillar of that sovereignty for the GCC. So according to that report that I stated before with The Gulf's digital transformation report, GCC countries are now channeling, you know, sustained investment, continue sustained investment into the AI infrastructure, which includes the data centers, the clouds, the GPUs, the digital public infrastructure, the AI focused higher educations and skills development, and, of course, the start ups and applied sectoral use cases that that are happening in the in the countries. So these investments are all systemic. And each country, I will state like, I will mention that the the countries yeah. It's also mentioned in the report.

They give an example. For example, The UAE, it has set itself a target to double the digital economy's contribution to GDP from 9.7% to 19.4% over the next decade, and this is with AI as the core. Oman, it aims to raise the digital economy's contribution from 2% of GDP in 2021 to 10% by 2014 with a broader digital economy program that includes fourth in fourth industrial revolution technologies and complemented by the the country's Oman's National Program for AI and advanced digital technologies, which is between 2024 and 2026. This is the the the program, basically. And then Saudi and UAE are also investing heavily in the hyperscale data centers, the AI superclusters and sovereign cloud infrastructure, recognizing that the control of compute is now a form of economic power.

So Saudi Arabia, for example, has invested heavily in the high performance computing by host which actually hosts six of the world's top 500 supercomputers. It represents half of the high performance machines in the EAP region and the MENA AP peer grouping. So this is according to the groupings of the World Bank, which includes the MENA Region, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the East Asia And Pacific. So supercomputers allow the state to train models, to simulate systems, and optimize logistics, and run national platforms without outsourcing core functions. So that's what sovereign compute looks like.

Well, that's actually you know, it's it's very impressive that we see the GCC region progressive, forward thinking, and understanding that the world is moving forward and and keeping up with the times. Not just keeping up. It's actually leading by the sounds of it. But I want us to just focus a little bit more on the sovereign compute. What does sovereign compute actually look like in practice?

And I'd also like to know why are GCC governments choosing to build national AI champions rather than leaving this to the private sector alone?

Yeah. Right. So you see, this this logic explains why the GCC governments are not just, you know, supporting the AI startups that we we are familiar with, but they are also building the national AI champions tied directly to the sovereign capital. So the who are these national AI that as you mentioned so as you asked, these are, for example, the Humane in Saudi Arabia. So Humane was launched in May 2025 this year under the public investment fund, which is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

And it is chaired by the crown prince himself, Mohammed bin Salman, and it has, you know, pursued large scale partnerships, including a reported reported 10,000,000,000 collaboration with AMD, which will allow it to accelerate the AI infrastructure and the compute capacity. And its mandate includes data centers, cloud infrastructure, advanced AI models, and Arabic Arabic language systems. So the scale of investment signals that Saudi Arabia is treating the AI the way it treats energy, the way it treats petrochemicals, and heavy industries in the earlier eras, like in the twentieth century, as I mentioned earlier. So another one is Qatar's national AI company, Kai, which was actually revealed just this month earlier this month. And it's owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, which is again the sovereign wealth fund for Qatar.

And it launched a $20,000,000,000 joint venture with the the Brookfield to develop AI infrastructure, including an integrated compute center to expand regional access to high performance computing. So Cotter's approach, it emphasized more on compute infrastructure and global partnership because it's a joint venture, as I said, with Brookfield. And so rather than framing the AI primarily as a domestic consumer or, you know, service play, it's positioning itself as a regional and global compute hub. So the AI infrastructure can then be exported as influence, and this is what you might call compute diplomacy. UAE.

In UAE, the model looks slightly different because UAE's AI ecosystem centers on the g forty two, where Mubadala is a minority shareholder. Mubadala is the I think, yeah, it's the sovereign wealth fund. And on MGX, which is launched also with Mubadala and g forty two as foundational partners to the scale, AI investments, and infrastructure. So it's an ecosystem model as opposed to a single company model, and UAE is building a network that combines sovereign funding from the mobilization, as I mentioned, the national champions, and the deep in the integration with the global technology players such as Microsoft's $1,500,000,000 investment in g forty two. And just described the partnership as part of UAE's push to become a global AI hub with governance and security commitment.

Again, there are other states, GCC states, that are also pursuing AI besides the three, but each one has got a different path. But at the end of the days, for example, Bahrain, it's emphasizing on AI governance, ethical frameworks by introducing a national AI policy in 2024 and large scale skilling you know, building skills program with the goal to train 50,000 Bahrainis in AI skills by 2030, which is through the the the initiatives. So it's positioning itself as a digitally mature state with strong institutional capacity. Oman's strategy is framed around a long run digital economy push, which includes the target to raise the digital economy contribution, as I mentioned earlier, to 10% of the GDP by 2040. Again, there's a major digital hub ambitions such as the Oman's digital triangle project, which aims to, you know, establish interconnect to the hubs in Burkha, and Dokum and Sur as gateways for AI and cloud services supported by green data centers and subsea cables.

And lastly, Kuwait's section focuses on digital transformation enablers and gaps, especially around the infrastructure and hyper security readiness rather than a single flagship national AI company at the scale of Humane or Kai or the g forty two in The UAE. So the t key takeaway is that across the GCC, the AI is being treated as as an economic infrastructure, and the flagship sovereign AI company models is most visible in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, and UAE, while other GCC states, the like Kuwait and Bahrain and Oman, are building the enabling capacities, so the regulation, the data governance, the skilling, and the digital services mainly. Now if we move on to the political independence dimension of this AR, What we mean by political independence is about, you know, policy autonomy, how it's the ability to choose partners, the ability to set standards, and to say no to you know, without if we've to say no without unacceptable costs. You know? So AI is becoming a tool of political independence because it enhances state capacity.

So states that can deploy AI across governments, they can model economic risks, they can manage population, optimize services, and then up anticipate shocks, and that makes them less vulnerable to external pressures. But there is another layer here, and there is that's, you know, where geopolitics becomes more subtle.

Shukran and sister, you've unpacked quite the, and I wanna thank you for that. Moving on to the next question. In an AI driven global system, how does control over infrastructure and governance translate into political independence without isolation or confrontation?

Right. Which is something that the GCC are good at. Right? Like so AI is increasingly governed through the language of trust. Now this was clearly visible at the recent World Summit AI Qatar twenty twenty five where, you know, there were more than 8,000 participants and around 100 international speakers.

And it featured the signing of strategic agreements and partnership and showcased the Qatar AI pavilion with national AI projects across governments and private institutions. That's actually it a day before that event actually was the day that CAI was unveiled. So it's signaling this platform is signaling where Qatar is positioning itself as a convener and as an AI infrastructure hub, which is through the and the compute build outs. So a dominant theme in that event throughout the summit was trust and responsible AI, not just as ethics, but as a strategic condition for adoption and market access. So if a country can credibly claim that its AI systems are secure, governed, they are aligned with international norms, it becomes a preferred partner.

So its infrastructure becomes something others plug into. In this sense, trust becomes a form of leverage. Now the actor that builds the most trusted AI infrastructure is not just building the technology, but they are also shaping the standards because every it will be a dependencies. They are shaping the dependencies. They are they are also forming long term relationships.

So this is why the governance frameworks and the ethics guidelines and the regulatory credibility of this AI matters so much in the especially in The Gulf's AI strategy. And it was really something that was really dominant theme in the summit that I mentioned in Qatar. So they are strategic assets, basically. And this leads to a critical point because political independence independence in the AI era does not come from isolation. It comes from being indispensable.

So if your compute, your, cloud, your models, and your standards are embedded in other systems, you gain influence without caution. And this is the quiet or soft power that the GCC is positioning itself, to yield. As I mentioned, they are really good at that. So now we come to the third dimension, which is the psychological decolonization because this is the third dimension that we always look at in Middle Nation. So the decolonization is not only about the economics or politics, but it's also about how societies imagine the future.

So for decades, technological modernity has been imported into the region. It's designed somewhere elsewhere, obviously, and coded elsewhere, but adopted locally. So we will look into that, Shaula, next.

I love how you, you know, neatly explains psychological decolonization in such a simple way. But beyond economics and geopolitics, what does AI sovereignty mean for how societies in The Gulf imagine themselves as producers of knowledge?

Right. This is this is exactly what I have touched on earlier. So AI is dynamic. So it it and it changed the dynamics overall because the AI systems are trained on data. And what data is used reflects you know, how data reflects language.

It reflects the culture, the assumptions, the priorities. So if your language is missing from the data, then your reality is missing from the system, from the whole AI system. And this is why Arabic language AI, local data sets, and domestic research institutions matter. And these are not just technical issues. They are questions of agency.

Because when a society can build AI systems that, you know, understand its language, understand its norms, understand its context, it moves from adoption to origination, and that shift has psychological consequences. So it changed how a society sees itself, not just as a consumer of future designs, which which is designed somewhere else, but as a producer of future on its own terms. And the most important point here is that AI sovereignty is also about epistemological or epistemic sovereignty, which means that the whose knowledge is going to be used or whose language becomes the default. And this is what psychological decolonization looks like in the AI era. I'll give you an example, for example, what I mean when these flag flagship or these champions in the LLM.

So in Saudi Arabia, this is called ALLAM. ALLAM is developed by the Saudi Data and AI Authority in collaboration with Aramco and National Research Partners. So ALLAM is an Arabic first model. It's trained its training is drawn on curated Arabic corpora, and that includes government documents. It includes legal and regulatory text, formal Arabic media, and institutional knowledge.

So it does not rely on, open English language web data. It uses this the the the sources that I've mentioned. So the forward plan is to deep deepen its use across the government, across education, across the public administration, and to evolve it under the new Saudi government Saudi

know,

the one that they govern the Saudi government data and compute infrastructure that they are building through the humane initiative. Another one is the JACE. JACE is the core model in The UAE. Actually, it was first built before the alarm, and it was developed by the g forty two in partnership with NBZ University of AI, UAI. So JACE is it's a bilingual English Arabic, but epistemologically, it's important because it treats Arabic as a first class reasoning language, not a translated edge case.

So its sources include curated Arabic text, regional media, and educational material, and filtered global datasets with governance controls over data quality and bias. So UAE's plan is to iteratively expand JACE for government, for enterprises, and cross border use while embedding its with like, embedding the JACE within a broader sovereign AI ecosystem supported by the the national compute and cloud infrastructure. And lastly, in Qatar, the flagship sovereign model is FANAR. Actually, FANAR version two was also released during the summit, the World Summit AI in Qatar that I mentioned earlier. And it was developed through Qatar Computing Research Institute and Ahmed bin Khalifa University under Qatar Foundation.

So FENAR is also Arabic first, and it's research driven. It is trained on high quality Arabic language resources, including classical and modern Arabic corpora regional data, regional media, educational content, and carefully filtered web data. So Qatar's next phase focuses on scaling FANAR through sovereign compute and data governance framework, you know, increasing links to the national AI platform, the the CHI data that was also unveiled during that summit. So in all these three cases, it's the same strategic logic. These models are not trained primarily on English language or Western Internet data.

They deliberately incorporate Arabic language, local institutions, legal systems, and cultural context, and their development road map you know, their development road maps keeps the data, the governments, and the compute under a national oversight. So that's that's the that's what sets it apart. Now lastly, what I just want to touch on is something that I heard brother Shahid bring it up in his one of his latest videos. So the massive AI infrastructure or the investment that is on AI is it's tied to a new era of governance as well because AI as state management and even as a policing state phase where, you know, governments become more they become the media customers for data fusion, for identity systems, and predictive enforcement. So AI is you know, it's it's it's becoming relevant, and it's increasingly instrumental for state managements because they use it for identity systems.

They use it for mobility control. They use it for risk scoring, you know, credit risk scoring, for enforcement, and compliance. So governments are becoming the major customers of AI systems, not only for efficiency, but also for control. Now AI is the force multiplier for those systems. Therefore, whoever owns a scalable, whoever owns a trusted AI infrastructure can then become indispensable, not only domestically, but he they can export it.

They can be exporters of governance technology. So with all the GCC financial capital, with the chip sourcing efforts and the data centers that they are investing in, you know, this could be an exportable capacity that can be geopolitically possible. And this brings us, you know, to the conclusion of my briefing briefing for this region, the GCC. Let me just, you know, summarize in three takeaways, what hopefully, minute, what we have mentioned so far. So first, in terms of economic sovereignty, the GCC is converting sovereign capital into sovereign compute.

AI infrastructure is becoming a new strategic base alongside energy and finance. Second, in terms of political independence, the AI capacity and governance credibility are becoming tools of leverage in in global partnerships, but trust is and trust is not just ethics. It is also a means of of influence in this in this case. And thirdly, the psychological decolonization aspect. It's building local AI capability, especially in language and data.

It's about agency, about defining the future rather than importing it. And so the GCC's massive infrastructure sorry. The massive investments in AI are not merely about productivity or efficiency. They are about escaping the structural dependence. It's about redefining the state power and, of course, you know, positioning repositioning the Gulf in the global hierarchy of knowledge and innovation.

Sister Samira, thank you so much for summarizing it and explaining to us, you know, how this can benefit, obviously, the GCC and the way that they're positioning themselves on the global scale. It's not just about power within their region or within the region of of of the GCC, but it should but it will also benefit, you know, the rest of the world with what they can be doing. And I love the fact that you've touched on the psychological decolonization, the way language is used. And if English is used, it's not the main, you know, mechanism or the main way that that that the AI is being programmed and that type of thing. Arabic is the language of choice, obviously, because, you know, GCI, Arab, RILS.

But, I mean, in in especially in terms of what the goal of exporting it out of the region, you know, some of it or whatever the case may be, it's not it's it's about making sure that the GCC stamp is on it. Yes. And that is positioning themselves beyond and and and and leaders that is forward thinking and ensuring that, you know, things for the globe changes for the better. So thank you so much for this briefing, and then also thank you to everybody that is listening. I just like to remind everybody, please make sure that you follow Brother Shade Bolson, Shahid Bolson on YouTube.

Please follow Marrow Nation as well. You can also find us on TikTok, X, and Instagram. And with that said, we've reached a close.

So