Saudi Arabia and the UAE are buying a lot of special computer chips from Nvidia, a company that makes things for artificial intelligence (AI). These chips are very important for making AI smarter. This is a big competition happening all over the world, and it’s making it hard to find these special chips.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE want to be really good at AI and use it to help their countries become better. But some people worry that these powerful tools could be used the wrong way by the leaders of these countries, who have a lot of money from oil.
The Financial Times says that Saudi Arabia got around 3,000 of Nvidia’s special chips. Each chip costs a lot of money, about $40,000! These chips help computers make things using AI. The Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) bought these chips.
The UAE is also getting lots of these chips and made its own AI thing called Falcon. This Falcon can talk and write like humans. They made this at their Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi.
The Saudi and UAE governments are getting these chips for their own groups. At the same time, big tech companies all over the world are trying to get these chips for their own AI projects.
KAUST in Saudi Arabia is getting 3,000 of these special chips, and they will be worth about $120 million by the end of 2023.
Just to help you understand, a different AI thing made by OpenAI used around 1,024 chips and took over a month to learn. This means KAUST will have stronger chips and can teach AI things faster.
Saudi Arabia’s university is making a supercomputer called Shaheen III, which will start working this year. It will use Nvidia’s special chips to do really smart AI work.
The UAE is more focused on AI for language. Their Falcon model was trained on 384 of these chips for two months. This model impressed experts and important people, like Marc Andreessen, who invests money in new ideas.