"Lurking behind every synthetic podcast and serving of AI slop is a huge, thrumming data center: Hundreds of Hydra-sized server cabinets lined up in tight rows, running computing processes that are tens or hundreds of times more energy-intensive than ordinary web searches. And behind those is another set of data centers that train foundational AI models. To keep pace with demand, AI companies need more data centers all over the world—plus the land to put them on, the water to cool them, the electricity to power them, and the microchips to run them. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that tech companies will pour a trillion dollars into new AI data centers over the next five years.

Building out the next phase of AI, in short, is set to require mind-boggling amounts of capital, real estate, and electricity—and the Gulf States, with their vast oil wealth and energy resources, possess all three. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar have all set up major AI investment funds in the past couple of years. But as a home for new data centers and a source of investment capital, the UAE has emerged as a particularly attractive potential partner on a number of fronts—from its sheer wealth to its brand-new nuclear power supply to the relative sophistication of its own AI sector.

But there’s a rub: Any American AI partnership with the UAE is, in some way, a relationship with Sheikh Tahnoun himself—and for years many of Tahnoun’s most important technology partners have been Chinese."

https://www.wired.com/story/uae-intelligence-chief-ai-money/

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