When a U.S. president lands in Riyadh flanked not by generals or oil executives, but by some of the most powerful tech leaders in the world, it’s not out of place to consider it as something deeper than diplomacy. On May 13, President Donald Trump stepped off the plane in Saudi Arabia accompanied by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, AMD’s Lisa Su and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Beyond being a resplendent spectacle of commerce, it was a declaration that the next frontier of geopolitical power would be built on artificial intelligence.

At the center of this message was a single number: $600 billion — the scale of investment commitments to be exchanged between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, spanning AI, cloud infrastructure, energy, aerospace and more. But beneath all the shiny headlines we’ve seen so far, this deal reflects the urgent and increasingly complex race to build sovereign AI infrastructure and influence the global AI supply chain before someone else does.

The linchpin of Saudi Arabia’s strategy is Humain, a newly launched AI company backed by the country’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In partnership with Nvidia and AMD, Humain aims to transform the Kingdom into a regional AI superpower. According to Reuters, Nvidia will provide hundreds of thousands of its newest Blackwell GPUs over five years, starting with 18,000 chips to power a Saudi-built supercomputer. AMD has committed to a $10 billion collaboration with Humain and Qualcomm has also signed an MOU to contribute server CPUs.

The company will oversee the construction of high-capacity AI data centers, train and deploy sovereign AI models — including Arabic-language LLMs — and manage cloud infrastructure to support AI development across sectors. “In building an AI company, you need the foundation and the infrastructure,” said Humain CEO Tareq Amin during the launch. “It’s a really, really big initiative for the Kingdom.”

The scale and seriousness of Saudi Arabia’s AI push came into sharper focus when Google Cloud also announced a joint $10 billion investment with the PIF to co-build a global AI hub in Dammam in partnership with Humain. The hub aims to deliver advanced AI capabilities to companies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, create thousands of jobs and extend U.S. AI influence abroad.

“Together we will create highly-skilled jobs and deliver AI training programs to open new, rewarding career pathways for Saudis,” said Ruth Porat, president and CIO of Alphabet and Google. The company estimates the hub will generate $35 billion for the U.S. economy and create 11,000 jobs by 2040.

Saudi Arabia also plans to train 20,000 AI specialists by 2030, according to Arab News, a talent development goal that places it among the few nations actively building an AI-ready workforce at scale.

More than mere ambition, it all looks like a calculated move to own the full AI stack — compute, models and data — inside national borders. “I view this as a strategic pivot towards sovereign AI capabilities,” Nic Adams, co-founder and CEO of 0rcus told me in an interview. “By investing in domestic AI factories and training programs, Saudi Arabia aims to reduce dependency on external technologies, further asserting its position in the global AI hierarchy,” he added.

The U.S. isn’t just exporting chips to Saudi Arabia. What it’s doing, according to industry analysts, is embedding influence and positioning itself to be the dominant force in the race for AI leadership, especially with China carving out its own enclave at speed. And yet, that influence is starting to look increasingly bilateral.

The Saudi firm DataVolt is investing $20 billion in AI data centers and energy infrastructure within the United States. In turn, companies like AMD, Oracle, Salesforce and Uber have committed a combined $80 billion in joint investments spanning both countries, as noted in the official White House fact sheet.

“Countries will want AI data centers within their borders,” Kevin Surace, CEO of Appvance, explained. “This is one example of a trend about to become a flood. AI is the new oil. Saudi Arabia is a long-term ally. Moving ahead with world-class AI infrastructure in-country solidifies that relationship for the next several decades.”

That’s a school of thought shared by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who called AI “essential infrastructure for every nation” in a press release. “Together with Humain, we are building AI infrastructure for the people and companies of Saudi Arabia to realize the bold vision of the Kingdom.”

This isn’t the first time the U.S. or U.S. big tech companies have partnered with a Gulf state or Gulf-based company to build next-gen AI infrastructure. Early in 2024, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42, a leading AI firm based in the UAE.

More recently, and as part of the Stargate project — a $500 billion joint venture involving OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle — OpenAI and G42 announced a plan to build the world’s largest AI data center, a 5 gigawatt, 10-square-mile facility that TechCrunch described as “bigger than Monaco” in the UAE city of Abu Dhabi. To be clear, OpenAI and G42 have a relationship that dates back to 2023 when both companies first announced a partnership “to deploy advanced AI capabilities optimized for the UAE and broader region.”

OpenAI’s first Stargate facility in Abilene, Texas would reach 1.2 gigawatts, according to projections, but this new Stargate facility in Abu Dhabi is projected to be over four times that size — a scale that’s estimated to consume the same energy as five nuclear reactors.

Now, Saudi Arabia’s Humain appears to be its counterpart, potentially rivaling Stargate in both scope and ambition. The strategic permutation, it seems, is that the Trump administration believes it’s better to have Gulf nations building their AI economies alongside the U.S. than with China.

Still, not everyone is convinced this is a total win. The decision by the Trump administration to rescind Biden-era export restrictions on advanced AI chips, specifically for Saudi Arabia’s Humain and the UAE’s G42, has raised eyebrows. Without a doubt, these partnerships deepen American footholds in the region’s AI economy.

However, according to The New York Times, there have been concerns among U.S. officials and national security experts that collaborations with Gulf-based companies like G42 — which has been previously linked with Chinese companies, including Huawei and BGI — could give China, another superpower racing for AI dominance, unrestricted access to cutting-edge chips and advanced technology that may erode long-term U.S. technological leverage.

“Ever since the Trump administration came into power, Saudi Arabia has been lobbying consistently to get taken off the restricted list,” said Janet Egan, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, speaking to Fortune. “The thing I’m worried about is that America makes short-term trade deals for short-term benefit — signing away any restrictions on chips — that undermine the United States’ long-term strategic advantage.”

This concern is magnified by the fact that U.S. tech firms are actively lobbying for Middle Eastern capital. OpenAI’s “AI in America” blueprint encourages welcoming investments from Gulf nations, arguing that if the U.S. doesn’t, countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia will funnel their capital toward China instead.

Add to that the expanding presence of companies like Amazon-backed Scale AI, which announced plans to open a Saudi office, and the lines between public diplomacy and private interest begin to blur.

Already, geopolitics experts are asking if the Gulf is becoming the new epicenter of AI globalization — not just as a funding source, but as a zone of competitive infrastructure-building between allies. That reality, according to experts, could introduce new long-term dependencies.

Should one nation emerge as the dominant AI power in the Gulf, it could have outsized influence over regional digital governance, data flows and platform access — issues that are still loosely regulated today.

From the U.S. standpoint, said Adams, this AI pact presents both opportunities and challenges. “It opens avenues for American companies to engage in lucrative projects and reinforces diplomatic ties. On the contrary, it raises concerns about technology transfer and the potential for AI advancements to be leveraged in ways that may not align with U.S. interests,” he explained. In other words, the deal could accelerate the rise of sovereign AI states — nations that no longer need to import intelligence, because they can build, train and deploy their own.

He added that this partnership exemplifies the shifting dynamics in global AI development, where emerging economies are building capabilities at warp speed to challenge established tech leaders.

Whether this development leads to more equitable global innovation or entrenched digital spheres of influence remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: AI is no longer just a tool or trend, but is fast becoming the infrastructure that will usher in a new realm of global dominance. And whoever builds it, according to AI and geopolitics experts, will own the future.