Play it right and Saudi Arabia will be an AI powerhouse, says former Google chief

PIF and Google Cloud announce a partnership to create global AI hub in Dammam at FII summit

Eric Schmidt, Former CEO and chairperson at Google, speaking at FII summit in Riyadh. Photo: Salim A Essaid / The National

Saudi Arabia is positioned to be one of AI’s global leaders given its combination of capital, natural resources and governance according to Google’s former chairman and chief executive.

“Saudi in particular can become one of the winners, one of the big winners here (in AI) if the country puts the money that's in place now wisely and quickly,” said Eric Schmidt on Wednesday.

“There are discussions within the government here about how to do that,” said the former Google head who shared his views with attendees at the eighth edition of the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh.

He added that he was familiar with the discussions and “they look roughly right to me”.

He spoke hours before Google Cloud announced a major partnership with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, to establish state-of-the-art infrastructure in the country’s eastern province of Dammam.

It is hoped the AI hub will generate thousands of jobs that would add an estimated $71 billion to the kingdom’s gross domestic product over the next eight years.

This is an expansion of Google Cloud’s November 2023 launch in Dammam, and expansion of data sovereignty and security services in August of this year.

Mr Schmidt said the simplest way the kingdom could achieve AI leadership is by using its abundant resources and creating facilities that “no one else can build”.

Large pools of capital and energy are needed to build data centres – the foundation of advanced AI – which he said “Saudi Arabia is capable of doing” compared to its global competitors.

“There is a huge shortage of electricity in the developed world. One estimate is that the US will run out of electricity for this kind of stuff by 2028,” he said.

Military AI

Mr Schmidt said that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries can use their future leadership in AI to protect areas of high security amid geopolitical conflicts.

The use of drones guided by artificial general intelligence (AGI) is redefining defence and the system of warfare in general. They are much more cost effective and more impactful than traditional military tools.

“The world has an awful lot of tanks. Those tanks are largely useless in that a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank” with ease as they are guided with increasingly more sophisticated AI, he said.

Traditional readiness systems, which the US air force developed 70 years ago in the Second World War to counter incoming threats, are being updated with drones that are able to automatically and instantly react, Mr Schmidt said.

The rate of AI advancement is happening in real time and on both sides of conflicts, he said, citing the Russia-Ukraine war.

“In Ukraine, any idea on one side is adopted by the other side within three to six weeks, because they’re both watching each other,” he said.

The day before, Tesla CEO Elon Musk virtually joined the FII summit and said that while AI developments will be beneficial, there were also chances of adverse outcomes.

There’s a “10 to 20 per cent chance, that it goes bad”, depending on who gets a hold of it, Mr Musk said.