Silicon Desert and Robot Kings

How the Saudis are replacing "black gold" with artificial intelligence

​In the desert where yesterday the speed of Arabian horses was measured, data centers are now being built. Saudi Arabia is trying to jump from the role of “the world’s gas station” to the role of “the world’s server,” buying itself a place in the artificial intelligence elite with oil money — and at the same time building a digital surveillance regime.

From gas station to "world server"

Saudi Arabia no longer wants to be just a source of cheap oil. It wants to become the infrastructure for global computing. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has understood a simple thing: the barrel will fall sooner or later, but the need to control people never will. So Riyadh has taken out its checkbook and is entering the AI ​​game at the level of a foundation state. While the West is chasing behind the illusory trillion in profits from artificial intelligence, the PIF fund is preparing real tens of billions and buying itself a place in the new AI hierarchy [1][2].

For Silicon Valley, this is a dilemma. To take this money is to turn a blind eye to human rights issues and the war in Yemen. To not take it is to give way to competitors. In the end, simple logic wins: desert cash often outweighs abstract reputation.

MBS Wallet: A Personal Corporation Instead of a State

At the center of the whole structure is one man: Yasser Al-Rumayyan. He heads the PIF, heads the board of directors of Saudi Aramco, shines in the football club Newcastle United and the boards of several global corporations. Formally, he is a “state manager.” In reality, he is MBS’s personal financial exoskeleton.

This design gives the kingdom a dangerous flexibility. In the morning, Al-Rumayyan approves oil production, in the afternoon a portion of the profits go to the PIF, and in the evening the fund invests in a startup that could make oil less necessary. The country invests in technologies that could destroy its own commodity model, but it does so in a way that keeps the same prince and the same wallet at the center of every scenario.

Alat: sand factories and soft absorption

The first dimension of Saudi expansion is “iron.” The PIF has created the industrial company Alat with a mandate to invest up to $100 billion by 2030 in electronics, robotics, and industrial AI. [3] The goal is to make Riyadh a global hub for the production of sophisticated equipment that can compete with Asia.

​Alat is not limited to buying ready-made solutions. It is moving factories directly into the desert. The partnership with SoftBank looks like an attempt to bring together robots, sensors, energy, and its own clean manufacturing under one roof [4]. The Saudis don’t just want to buy surveillance cameras—they want to control the lines where those cameras are made.

A case in point is the deal with Lenovo. Alat is investing $2 billion through three-year convertible bonds, and Lenovo is committing to moving its regional headquarters for the Middle East and Africa to Riyadh and building a manufacturing hub for PCs and servers there [5][6]. If all goes according to plan, the Saudis will get production, jobs, and the status of “gateway to Africa.” If not, the bonds are converted into shares, and Alat is transformed from a polite partner into a co-owner. This is not classic state development, it is a soft form of global takeover.

Humain and data centers: who counts the world's bits

The second dimension is “brains” and computing power. In May 2025, MBS launched a separate company, Humain, under the PIF umbrella. The true scale of the game became clear in November, when Humain announced a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI and a deal with Nvidia to expand its fleet to 600,000 GPUs (including the latest GB300s) over three years [8].

Humain is building not just data centers, but a full stack: from “intelligence factories” in collaboration with AWS worth over $5 billion to its own Arabic-language models. In parallel, the company is launching products like LLM Allam and services for the public sector. Formally, this is technological diversification. In reality, it is creating a “brain of the regime” that can simultaneously serve global clients and process data sets of its own citizens.

Competitors from Abu Dhabi are also playing on the same field. The UAE, through G42 and the MGX fund, linked to Mubadala and Microsoft, is building its own ecosystem of Falcon models and data centers with hundreds of megawatts. It is a real arms race in the desert: who will be the first to deploy gigawatts of capacity and take over the main stream of global computing. Meanwhile, Europe is bogged down in regulation, which are causing the continent to fall hopelessly behind in the AI ​​race…

Venture "special forces" and the Chinese bypass

The third dimension is the shadow geography of capital. This is where funds operate that are not featured in glossy promotional videos.

Sanabil Investments works like a venture capital “early-stage special forces.” It gets into startups before the FT writes about them, and gives PIF indirect access to Silicon Valley boards. If the project grows into a unicorn, the Saudis already have people inside and a package that allows them to influence strategy.

Prosperity7, Aramco’s venture capital fund, is acting even more aggressively. In 2024, it became a key foreign investor in the Chinese startup Zhipu AI, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of several billion [7][9]. Formally, it’s just a big deal in AI. In reality, it’s a slap in the face to Washington, which is limiting American investment in Chinese AI. Saudi money, through the oil venture, is entering where Western funds already are, and is given an “option” in case Beijing takes the lead in the model race.

In parallel, structures are working to build a “Chinese bridge” under the Saudi flag. Shared cloud services, logistics platforms, surveillance cameras — everything that looks toxic under the PRC brand suddenly becomes quite acceptable if you stick the logo of a fund from Riyadh on top. China gets markets and data, the Saudis get technology and the role of a mediator between the two camps.

Washington Leash and the Game of Two Camps

Over the whole structure hangs a simple fact: without American chips and software, this entire empire of “smart deserts” will crumble. US Department of Commerce licenses, export controls, access to Nvidia and American cloud giants — this is the real leash on which Washington keeps the Saudis and Emiratis.

In recent years, the States has been nervously watching how technology can leak to China through Arab hubs. That is why the G42 in the UAE and a number of structures in Saudi Arabia have already publicly refused Chinese equipment in sensitive segments. Formally, they are “protecting data.” In reality, they are trying not to anger the Department of Commerce.

At the same time, these same structures are entering Chinese startups, setting up their servers in Africa, and luring European deep-tech teams that lack funding. As a result, Saudi Arabia is turning into a hub of dual loyalty. During the day, it demonstrates a strategic partnership with the United States, and at night, it concludes agreements that insure it in the event of a victory for Beijing. This is not an ally in the classical sense, this is a well-paid mercenary with its own server platform.

NEOM as a political interface and franchise of authoritarianism

Projects like NEOM and The Line are being sold to the world as futuristic urbanism. In reality, they are political interfaces. A camera city, a beta city for total surveillance. Every sensor, every camera, every recognition model is a cog in a system where a single tweet can get you decades of imprisonment.

In such a model, AI becomes the perfect supervisor. It doesn’t get tired, doesn’t take days off, doesn’t join a union, and doesn’t ask why a person was put in a position. Authoritarian regimes have long sought a way to combine modernization with total control. Oil provided money, but not tools. Now tools arrive on charter flights along with chips, consultants, and NDAs in English.

The Saudi model is dangerous because it can be exported. If the experiment with Alat, Humain, and NEOM is successful, the kingdom will not just get a new export item. It will be able to sell a ready-made franchise of digital authoritarianism: “servers + software + political manual.” From African megacities to post-Soviet capitals — turnkey.

A glass castle on an oil foundation

The Saudis are trying to rewrite their own social contract. Instead of “we give you subsidized gasoline,” it’s “we give you futuristic cities, digital convenience, and the feeling that you live at the center of the world.” It’s an expensive, shiny glass castle built on the same petroleum foundation.

American and Chinese corporations are no saints in this game either. They buy market access and cheap energy, turning a blind eye to the fact that their algorithms help build a regime where privacy is a luxury and human rights are a variable in the business plan. Europe is selling its laboratories to somehow save them.

As long as oil prices are high, the system works. Algorithms are trained, data centers are humming, princes are signing new memoranda. But any control machine has a built-in vulnerability: iron becomes more expensive, and fear loses its power over time. At some point, there may really be only a bunch of servers left in the desert, which will honestly calculate: it was not the user's fault. It was the regime's fault.

Sources

[1] Reuters - Saudi Arabia plans $40 bln push into artificial intelligence - NYT reports, March 2024.

[2] Bloomberg — Saudi Wealth Firm, Andreessen Eye Up to $40 Billion for AI Fund, March 2024.

[3] ITP.net — Alat announces partnerships, looking to invest 100bn by 2030, February 2024.

[4] SoftBank Group — Strategic partnership formed with Alat, May 2024.

[5] Alat — Lenovo completes US$2 billion investment and strategic collaboration, September 2024.

[6] Lenovo — Strategic collaboration with Alat to accelerate AI infrastructure development, September 2024.

[7] EqualOcean / AsiaTechDaily — Zhipu AI Secures $400M from Saudi's Prosperity7 Ventures, June 2024.

[8] Reuters / PIF / Nvidia Press Release — Humain launch, xAI partnership and plan for 600k GPUs, 2025.

[9] Financial Times — Aramco's Prosperity7 invests in China's Zhipu AI, June 2024.

Maurice K for Newsky © 2025