The Gulf states are betting big on AI: who’s investing where?

The Gulf states have emerged as heavyweight backers of artificial intelligence, funneling billions into startups, data centres and chip supply as part of an aggressive push to capture future economic growth. Sovereign and private investors from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman have taken stakes in marquee AI and space plays — including a $3 billion investment by the PIF-backed AI venture HUMAIN into xAI’s $20 billion Series E, holdings that converted into SpaceX shares after xAI’s merger — while regional investors also participated in funding rounds for Anthropic and OpenAI.

"At a moment when capital spending on AI infrastructure is climbing into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the Gulf’s appetite for scale and speed gives Washington something rare: an external accelerator," said Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

That appetite is visible across multiple fronts. SpaceX is widely tipped for a blockbuster listing valued at around $1.77 trillion, a windfall for Gulf shareholders who include HUMAIN, Prince Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding, the Oman Investment Authority, the Qatar Investment Authority, the International Holding Company and Alpha Dhabi Holding. Abu Dhabi’s MGX also took part in xAI’s most recent funding round and participated in Anthropic’s fundraising.

Anthropic itself raised $65 billion in a Series H round that pushed its valuation to $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s most recent private valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic said funding from investors including MGX will be used to expand computing capacity as demand accelerates. The competition for compute is a central challenge: training ever-larger models requires large, secure supplies of chips, power and data-centre capacity.

Major projects and strategic partners

• Stargate UAE: a campus planned to deliver up to 5 gigawatts of compute for AI data centres in Abu Dhabi, with a 1-gigawatt compute cluster as a flagship element and a first phase of 200 megawatts expected to be operational before year-end.
• Estimated cost and partners: the Stargate UAE campus is being developed at roughly $30 billion by Abu Dhabi’s G42 in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank.
• Hardware supply: the UAE recently received its first shipment of Nvidia chips to help construct the 5GW AI campus.

The Gulf’s pivot to AI follows an earlier era of speculative tech bets. Sovereign funds including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala were notable investors in SoftBank’s original $93 billion Vision Fund, a vehicle that suffered high-profile setbacks such as WeWork’s bankruptcy and restructuring. Those lessons appear to have informed a broader shift toward investing in infrastructure and foundational AI assets rather than only risky consumer startups.

Policy goals underline the urgency: Saudi Arabia has set a target for AI to contribute 12% of GDP by the end of the decade, while the UAE aims for 40% by 2031. With major public and private players already committed to chip purchases, data-centre construction and equity stakes in leading AI developers, competition among Gulf states to secure strategic positions in the global AI supply chain is likely to intensify through the remainder of the decade.