Brookfield Asset Management has announced a $100 billion AI initiative in collaboration with Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA). This massive undertaking aims to develop and deploy significant AI infrastructure globally. The partnership brings together a major global investment firm, a leading AI chip manufacturer, and a prominent sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East. Why it matters: This substantial investment signifies a major commitment from a GCC sovereign wealth fund to accelerate global AI development and infrastructure, leveraging top-tier international partnerships.
Saudi Arabia is reportedly investing $900 million into WME, a Hollywood talent agency, to develop its AI capabilities. The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) is leading the investment through its SRJ Sports Investments arm. WME plans to build AI tools to better predict audience behavior and streamline film production. Why it matters: The deal provides Saudi Arabia with a stake in the future of entertainment AI, aligning with its broader Vision 2030 goals of diversifying the economy.
KAUST has unveiled Shaheen III, the most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East and 18th globally, built by HPE. The system uses 2,800 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, tripling the processing power of its predecessor. Shaheen III will support research in Arabic LLMs, climate modeling, remote sensing, automated chemistry, and AI-driven healthcare. Why it matters: This infrastructure investment strengthens Saudi Arabia's position in AI and computational research, enabling advances tailored to the region's needs and priorities.
This paper analyzes the energy consumption and carbon footprint of LLM inference in the UAE compared to Iceland, Germany, and the USA. The study uses DeepSeek Coder 1.3B and the HumanEval dataset to evaluate code generation. It provides a comparative analysis of geographical trade-offs for climate-aware AI deployment, specifically addressing the challenges and potential of datacenters in desert regions.
The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) has signed seven Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with major US technology companies. These partnerships aim to advance AI innovation, develop digital infrastructure, and foster a data-driven economy in Saudi Arabia, aligning with the Kingdom's Vision 2030 goals. The agreements cover areas such as AI research, smart city development, and technology skills training. Why it matters: This signals Saudi Arabia's intent to accelerate its AI capabilities through strategic international collaborations, with a focus on practical applications and economic diversification.
Researchers at MBZUAI have introduced EvoLMM, a self-evolving framework for large multimodal models that enhances reasoning capabilities without human-annotated data or reward distillation. EvoLMM uses two cooperative agents, a Proposer and a Solver, which generate image-grounded questions and solve them through internal consistency, using a continuous self-rewarding process. Evaluations using Qwen2.5-VL as the base model showed performance gains of up to 3% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks like ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision using only raw training images.
Luma AI, a startup developing multimodal AGI, has raised $900 million in a funding round led by HUMAIN, a Saudi Arabia-based investment firm. The company is focused on building general-purpose AI models that can understand and generate different types of data, including images, video, and 3D scenes. This funding round will allow Luma AI to scale its research and development efforts. Why it matters: This investment signals the growing interest and financial commitment from Saudi Arabian entities in advancing artificial general intelligence capabilities.
The US and Saudi Arabia have signed a Strategic Artificial Intelligence Partnership. The agreement aims to promote cooperation between the two countries in the field of AI across various sectors. It also focuses on fostering responsible AI development and deployment. Why it matters: This partnership signifies growing international collaboration with Saudi Arabia in AI, potentially accelerating the Kingdom's Vision 2030 goals for technological advancement.
California-based AI startup CoreWeave has raised $900 million in funding, backed by Saudi Arabia-affiliated investment firm Mubadala. CoreWeave specializes in providing cloud infrastructure for compute-intensive tasks like AI and machine learning. The investment signals growing Saudi interest in AI infrastructure and capabilities. Why it matters: This move could accelerate AI development in Saudi Arabia by providing access to specialized computing resources.
This paper proposes a framework for understanding AI sovereignty as a balance between autonomy and interdependence, considering global data, supply chains, and standards. It introduces a planner's model with policy heuristics for equalizing marginal returns across sovereignty pillars and setting openness. The model is applied to India and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and UAE), finding that managed interdependence, rather than isolation, is key for AI sovereignty.