Saudi Arabia's $930 billion sovereign wealth fund made the pitch for the kingdom to become a major host of AI data centers at the kingdom's annual showcase summit FII

Saudi Arabia has over the last decade used its massive oil wealth to become an important backer of technology companies. Now at the Future Investment Initiative Institute, the kingdom’s annual showcase dubbed “Davos in the desert” it made its pitch to become a major hub for AI data centers.

During FII’s opening session, Yasir Al Rumayyan, chairman of Saudi’s $930 billion sovereign wealth fund, told tech companies to build the massive data centers needed to train and run new AI systems in the kingdom to take advantage of its energy resources, global location, and available land. “The reason why we are investing in AI is Saudi Arabia is very well positioned to be a global hub, not only a regional hub,” Rumayyan said.

The kingdom’s pitch on AI was met with a warm reception from some of the Wall Street and Silicon Valley power brokers who flew into the summit in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. “The presence of very large pools of capital, energy and the ability to build the data centers will be a key point,” said Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s former executive chairman.

Schmidt endorsed the kingdom’s pitch noting that AI training and inference could be run from data centers based there to sidestep constraints on electricity generation and transmission in the United States. “There’s every reason to think that Saudi can become one of the big winners here if........

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