Nvidia · China · United Arab Emirates · Rest of World
Nvidia’s free AI model could push the UAE closer to the U.S.
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Nvidia’s chips are driving the United Arab Emirates’ rise as an artificial-intelligence power.
Key facts
- To change that, Nvidia has also agreed to pay almost $13 billion to buy Hugging Face
- Last month, Nvidia spent $7 billion to buy a stake in U.S. coding startup Poolside and license the tools it uses to build AI models
- Earlier versions of U.S. AI models have lagged well behind China’s free models, which were downloaded roughly 2 billion times this year, far ahead of any Western rival, according to an August report
- Few countries fit that description better than the UAE, whose flagship data center will run on 400,000 Nvidia chips
Summary
Last month, Nvidia spent $7 billion to buy a stake in U.S. coding startup Poolside and license the tools it uses to build AI models. For years the UAE positioned itself as neutral ground between the U.S. and China, buying chips from the former and, until recently, equipment from the latter. “The last missing piece was the model layer,” Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington, told Rest of World. The two institutions leading the UAE’s AI push each have their own view on whether to build sovereign AI models from scratch or lean on existing technology from other companies.