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Lina Tayara

August 21, 2025 23:38

Artificial intelligence is reshaping science, society, and power. Many debates over its likely impact are fixated on extremes: utopian visions of universal benefit and dystopian fears of existential doom, an arms race between the US and China or between the Global North and Global South. What is missing is a serious conversation about distribution.

The global AI landscape is increasingly defined not just by geopolitical divides, but by the deepening imbalance between public governance and private control. As public governance struggles to keep pace with AI and concern rises about a handful of tech giants that have amassed disproportionate influence, governments are exploring models that ensure strategic autonomy and secure data governance and long-term operational resilience.

Earlier this year, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan introduced one such model at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Kingdom’s “data center embassy” initiative. The initiative proposes a legal framework granting sovereign status to designated data centers. Similar in concept to diplomatic missions, these data embassies are intended to safeguard critical infrastructure and data while enabling international cooperation.

The announcement was followed by the release of a public draft of legislation making ������Ƶ the first G20 country to publish a groundbreaking comprehensive legal framework offering legal clarity for operators and investors and a roadmap for investment in and the development of data embassies via bilateral relationships with foreign states, hyperscalers, and other digital service providers.

This push for sovereign AI coincides with ������Ƶ’s accelerating partnerships. One compelling case was Groq, a California-based language processing unit company founded by a former Google engineer.

Governments will supply AI in the same way they supply utilities like electricity. But how much AI do they need to provide citizens? AI models think and understand in tokens, the currency unit of AI. They input data as tokens, and they output the answers as tokens.

The global AI landscape is increasingly defined not just by geopolitical divides, but by the deepening imbalance between public governance and private control.

Lina Tayara

I listened to Groq’s chief technology officer recently share a thought experiment. At a benchmark of 1 token per second per citizen, a nation of 50 million people would need to serve 5.5 trillion tokens daily. Meeting that demand means not just infrastructure, but speed and energy.

He shared a live case: In February, Groq launched operations in ������Ƶ just 51 days after contract execution, moving equipment via a 747, clearing both US export controls and Saudi import regulations in record time. By launch, they were delivering 4 million tokens per second, with demand consumed instantly by global developers and enterprises.

With vast land, low energy costs, and growing capital access, the Kingdom is positioning itself as the home of high-scale AI compute. Saudi state-backed AI company Humain represents a shift for AI as a sovereign system, owned, operated, and controlled domestically. This matters because true sovereignty in the AI era means independence from external algorithms and opaque models. It is about ensuring that critical decisions — whether military, economic, or cultural — are made within systems accountable to national, not foreign, shareholders.

That sovereignty also makes ������Ƶ an increasingly attractive destination for capital. A recent Mercer analysis found that investors managing over $17 trillion are shifting toward private markets, especially infrastructure and digital assets, driven by geopolitical uncertainty. The Kingdom’s AI legal environment offers clarity and protection that this capital is actively seeking.

As ������Ƶ’s Global AI Hub Law moves through public consultation and toward enactment, it stands to influence digital governance and global investment patterns, a model others may soon follow.

• Lina Tayara is a consultant driving business development, market research, and thought leadership on her platform Let’s Talk Tech.