HUMAIN bets on both AI blocs with MiniMax deal

Saudi Arabia's approach at the LEAP conference reflects a deliberate strategy rather than a contradiction. The conventional view splits AI into two blocs: the US, with Nvidia, hyperscalers, and leading frontier labs, and China, with its own models, engineering capacity, and increasingly competitive stack. Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE don't need to replicate either. Their value may lie in being among the few places where both can operate at once.

The strategy stems from a simple calculation. American restrictions push Riyadh toward Chinese alternatives, while Chinese shortfalls in frontier performance push it back toward Washington. Both sides end up competing for something the Gulf increasingly controls: AI infrastructure. The Gulf's advantages include capital, energy, and land, plus geopolitical flexibility. HUMAIN is building with American technology and has agreed Chinese frontier models won't be trained on US-approved computing capacity, while keeping relationships with Chinese firms open — including ByteDance's cloud arm building in Riyadh, Tencent Cloud securing a Saudi operating license, and Lenovo rolling out its first "Made in Saudi Arabia" laptop.

AI may feel like software, but in many ways it's more like heavy industry, with enormous data centers, electricity, cooling, land, and capital. Saudi Arabia has all of it. DataVolt's roughly $1 billion, 100-megawatt NEOM facility, with ambitions to expand to 360 megawatts, shows how the kingdom can compete by owning infrastructure rather than chips or models. The outcome hinges on whether Washington and Beijing both keep needing Gulf infrastructure, allowing Riyadh to extract investment, localization commitments, and technology transfer. If so, the AI competition may look more like the Cold War than expected — not two sealed blocs, but a handful of swing states playing both sides.