The Middle East must get ready for a US-China digital arms race

US President Donald Trump signs executive orders related to his AI Action Plan during the 'Winning the AI Race' summit in Washington in July. AFP

A starting gun fired this summer, but many of us didn’t hear it. On July 18, when the US unveiled its National AI Action Plan, it wasn’t just another policy document. It was a declaration, signalling the start of what could be humanity’s ultimate race: a global contest to build the digital foundations of the 21st century and, in the process, redefine the very meaning of national power.

For centuries, nations have vied for territory, resources and influence. This new competition is of a different order entirely. It is a sprint to embed artificial intelligence into every sector, every institution and every decision-making layer of society. AI is no longer a far-off concept from science fiction; it has become the invisible infrastructure of our present, the operating system of modern life. With its plan, the US has made its intentions clear: it is mobilising to win.

The American strategy is breathtaking in its scale and speed. This is not a cautious roadmap but a full-scale mobilisation of capital, talent and government will. The plan accelerates the National AI Research Resource, a flagship initiative backed by an initial $110 million to arm the nation’s researchers with the raw computing power needed to innovate. Yet this public push is dwarfed by the staggering ambitions of the private sector.

Elon Musk’s xAI is building a $10 billion “Gigafactory of Compute”, a cathedral of processing power designed to run on 100,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips. Not to be outdone, Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning a $100 billion data centre project codenamed Stargate.

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These are the moonshots of our time. And their impact is already filtering down into the machinery of government, where AI is being used to slash medical backlogs for veterans and help reduce the nearly 43,000 annual roadway deaths. This isn’t just automation; it’s a fundamental rewiring of the state into an entity that can learn and adapt in real time.

But America is not running this race alone. For every move the US makes, China has a powerful and increasingly sophisticated countermove, often executed with a different philosophy. While the US champions a public-private partnership model, China’s state-led industrial policy delivers breakthroughs with stunning speed.

Consider the shockwave sent through the robotics world this year by Unitree, a Chinese firm that launched a sophisticated humanoid robot for just $16,000. It was a watershed moment, transforming advanced robotics from a high-cost industrial tool into something approaching a mass-market product.

This focus on tangible, real-world applications is complemented by a brilliant software strategy. While American giants often keep their most powerful models proprietary, Beijing-based DeepSeek AI recently released its powerhouse DeepSeek-V2 model completely open-source. In doing so, it invited the world’s developers to build on its technology, a clever play to win the hearts and minds of the global tech community.

In this global digital race, there may be no prize for second place

However, this digital arms race is running headfirst into a very physical wall: energy. AI is insatiably power-hungry. By 2030, Nvidia’s AI servers alone are projected to consume more electricity annually than the entire country of Finland. Mr Musk predicts that within a year, the primary constraint on AI development will shift from a shortage of chips to a shortage of electricity.

Here, the competition becomes one of concrete and power grids. The US AI sector is projected to require 50 gigawatts of new power capacity by 2028. In 2023 alone, China added more than 400 gigawatts of new capacity, more than the rest of the world combined. The lesson is stark: winning the AI race isn’t just about designing algorithms in the cloud; it’s about having the industrial might to power them on the ground.

For those of us in the Middle East, the sound of this starting gun should echo with a particular urgency. Regional ambitions are high. The UAE has pioneered world-class Arabic language models and the use of AI in government applications, while Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is reportedly planning a $40 billion fund to invest in AI.

But the actions of the US and China reveal a new truth: ambition is no longer enough. Success now demands execution at a national scale, requiring the sovereign capabilities – computation, talent and especially energy – to sustain it.

The global race has begun. It is a contest not just for technological dominance, but for the right to shape the future of trade, security and society itself. And in this race, there may be no prize for second place.