Billion-dollar partnerships between the Gulf and Southeast Asia to redistribute power in artificial intelligence infrastructure

Today, comprehensive artificial intelligence capabilities are concentrated in the hands of two primary powers, the United States and China, which together produced eighty prominent models over the past year. The United States alone operates 5,427 data centres, more than ten times the number owned by any other country. Of the thirty-three nations hosting public AI cloud infrastructure, Washington and Beijing are the only ones operating these clouds entirely through domestic chips and service providers. Meanwhile, the global regulatory landscape is divided between a market-driven American approach, strict European regulation, and state-led central direction in China, leaving the rest of the world as rule-takers.

In response to this structural imbalance, the Arabian Gulf and Southeast Asia are moving to build a parallel partnership that shifts the balance of power, leveraging complementary strengths while avoiding the pursuit of unilateral self-sufficiency at the frontier of advanced models.The Gulf region possesses abundant investment capital, low-cost energy resources, and the capacity to deploy infrastructure at exceptional speed and scale, with Saudi Arabia channelling 100 billion dollars into startups and data centres through Project Transcendence, while the UAE has committed 148 billion dollars to artificial intelligence infrastructure over the past two years. This includes the UAE Stargate campus, a one-gigawatt compute project costing nearly 30 billion dollars built in partnership between G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Cisco, alongside the development of the Jais 2 model, trained on 600 billion Arabic tokens.

On the other hand, Southeast Asia offers a fast-growing digital market, with its digital economy projected to exceed 300 billion dollars in gross merchandise value, and the regional data centre market expected to grow from 13.7 billion dollars to 30.5 billion dollars by 2030.These bilateral ties are translating into concrete institutional projects driven by direct deals between governments and major entities, such as the framework agreement signed in February by Abu Dhabi-based tech group G42 with a Vietnamese consortium, valued at up to 1 billion dollars, to build cloud, sovereign, and industrial infrastructure alongside workforce training programmes, capitalising on Vietnam's standalone artificial intelligence law and its base of more than a quarter of the region's generative AI startups.

This economic and investment integration spans several strategic tracks, including Malaysia attracting 23 billion dollars in data centre investments during 2024 and its agreements with the UAE under the Madani AI initiative. It also encompasses a 15 billion dollar agreement signed by UAE clean energy firm Masdar in January 2025 to develop renewable energy projects in the Philippines, the Project mBridge cross-border digital currency initiative connecting the UAE, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia, and the joint declaration on economic cooperation between the Gulf Cooperation Council and ASEAN to bolster joint digital collaboration.

These partnerships take on added significance amid recent regional geopolitical tensions, compelling middle powers to diversify their alliances and supply chains to avoid overreliance on a single technology market. Research from the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Institute highlights the potential to expand these coalitions into joint sectoral pilots, where Southeast Asian nations serve as a testing ground for financial inclusion and digital credit for small businesses, while the Gulf leads advanced deployments in digitising courts, public services, supply chains, and energy, alongside building dedicated language models tailored to the languages of both regions.Middle powers are demonstrating their ability to steer technology gains and capture real economic value, even as advanced chip manufacturing remains the exclusive preserve of Washington and Beijing.