London (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Efforts by Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to join the race for artificial intelligence could be hindered by US opposition to China’s growing footprint in the region. US President Joe Biden and his administration appear concerned that rising Chinese influence in the Middle East might cause sensitive US technology exported there to leak to China, a sign of Beijing’s growing commercial and diplomatic clout in the region. China’s nationalist and autocratic leader Xi Jinping has certainly moved to tighten geopolitical ties between his nation and a number of important Middle Eastern countries in recent times.
China’s top diplomat and current foreign minister Wang Yi arranged an unexpected Saudi-Iran peace agreement in March this year between Riyadh’s mercurial Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud and Iran’s aging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were all invited (and agreed) to join the emerging markets BRICS grouping of non-Western countries, with their membership to come into effect on January 1, 2024. China is overhauling President Xi’s ambitious Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) global infrastructure development programme and Beijing is seeking project funding from rich Muslim countries. Beijing therefore pushed the Iran-Saudi peace deal and supported Saudi Arabia’s application to join the BRICS to help it gain access to Saudi backing for the BRI. Another reason for growing Gulf-China ties is Beijing’s intensifying technological competition with Washington.
Growing US-China technology competition
The US is stepping up its efforts to contain China’s geopolitical and technological development in East Asia and outside it. In October 2022, Washington launched controls intended to prevent China from acquiring certain categories of semiconductor chips made with US equipment anywhere in the world, partially to prevent Beijing from using them to develop advanced new artificial intelligence systems. The US has since escalated these export restrictions on semiconductor chips to unspecified Middle Eastern countries, according to US multinational technology firm Nvidia late last month.
Meanwhile, a source at Nvidia’s commercial rival Advanced Micro Devices told media it had also received an official letter from the US government containing similar restrictions. The chips concerned were high-powered models used to improve machine-learning tasks for artificial intelligence programmes like ChatGPT. Gulf Arab states have been increasingly seeking to import advanced versions of these to create their own artificial intelligence models, but their growing technoscientific ties to China are a source of rising US unease.
CNBC: “U.S. curbs AI chip exports to some Middle Eastern countries”
China-US tensions were recently raised further following US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s recent combative trip to China, during which the Commerce Secretary explicitly said the US would remain hardline in its approach to limiting Chinese access to advanced technologies. Beijing didn’t pull any punches either, with US-blacklisted telecommunications company Huawei releasing its new Mate 60 Pro smartphone during Raimondo’s visit. Huawei’s smartphone business was crushed by US technology export restrictions in 2019 and the new handset showcases the firm’s partial evasion of these as well as its intension to reestablish itself in the sector.
On China’s tightly controlled internet Chinese citizens posted memes turning Raimondo into a brand ambassador for Huawei; a play on her department’s role in enforcing technology restrictions on Chinese firms like Huawei or Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), the partially state-owned Chinese company which allegedly built the semiconductor chip powering Huawei’s homemade phone. In response, US lawmakers have called for investigations to see whether SMIC broke US sanctions and supplied components to Huawei, while South Korean firm SK Hynix started a probe after discovering parts it manufactured were present inside Huawei’s new handsets.
US Fears About China-Middle Eastern Technological Cooperation
President Biden has made containing China’s technological rise — and any subsequent global spread of Chinese technologies, standards and norms about cyberspace — a central part of his administration’s foreign policy. At the same time Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as some of the biggest customers of US chip firms like Intel and Nvidia, the latter of whose high-powered products are much sought-after for their use in artificial intelligence research. The UAE has bought thousands of US semiconductor chips for a homegrown Arabic artificial intelligence model called Falcon, made by Abu Dhabi’s Technological Innovation Institute.
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia is spending $120 million to buy these to build its own ChatGPT-style large language model at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, despite using Chinese researchers. Gulf state leaders want to own and control artificial intelligence developments within their own countries, while using Chinese and US know-how to create their own local systems. There is also an element of Arab countries’ balancing the two sides to avoid dependency upon either one of them; Riyadh has allowed Huawei’s cloud arm to create a data centre in Saudi Arabia to support government services and artificial intelligence language models in Arabic despite using US-made chips to train them.
Gulf governments’ laxer approach to China likely lies behind August’s US imposition of restrictions on top artificial intelligence chips being exported unnamed Middle Eastern countries; such deliveries are unlikely to be going to already-hostile states like Iran. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud’s decision to rely on Chinese researchers to help Riyadh build its artificial intelligence models is especially likely to have angered President Biden, who personally dislikes the de facto Saudi leader, a sentiment the volatile crown prince reportedly returns.
Beijing will be intensely interested in the chance to send researchers to Saudi Arabia study US chip technologies so it can parallel engineer its own devices when they return home. Saudi Arabia and potentially other Gulf states therefore represent a weak spot in the global technological blockade President Biden is attempting to erect around China’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence sectors. Despite their diplomatic importance to the US, the Gulf states could therefore find their early enthusiasm for artificial intelligence hitting similar curbs to China’s if they continue to weaken US efforts to contain China’s technological rise.
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