The Middle East is “the best region” for data centers, according to Jonathan Ross, CEO of Groq, a company that makes AI chips. He said, Saudi Arabia’s abundance of oil makes it a suitable location for artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Due to the Middle Eastern country’s abundant energy resources, big technology companies have announced infrastructure partnerships in the region. Additionally, it is a component of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 agenda, which aims to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil.
Ross stated that Saudi Arabia has the potential to become a major net exporter of data during an interview at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Riyadh.
Ross, who formerly worked on AI chips at Alphabet, the parent company of Google, stated that data “is incredibly cheap to move” in contrast. He went on to say that the plan is to relocate the data within the country, perform the AI computation “here, and deliver the findings,” because there is a lot of extra energy in the Kingdom.
“What you don’t want to do is build a data center right next to people, where it’s expensive for the land, or where the energy is already being used. You want to build it where there isn’t, where there aren’t too many people, where the energy is underutilized. And that’s the Middle East, so this is the ideal place to build out.”
According to PwC, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to generate $320 billion in benefits for the Middle East. Saudi Arabia hopes to take advantage of this by integrating AI into its economic plan.
Being the “third-largest AI supplier in the world, behind the United States and China,” is their goal.
Although Saudi Arabia faces fierce competition, the United Arab Emirates has so far led the area in advancement. According to PwC, by 2030, artificial intelligence (AI) will boost the UAE economy by $96 billion, or 13.6% of GDP, while in Saudi Arabia, it may generate $135.2 billion, or 12.4% of GDP. Saudi Arabia would rank fourth in the global AI scoreboard, behind its neighbor, if those numbers materialize.
But data centers are hot and usually require a lot of water to cool, raising serious concerns about whether such equipment should be located in a hot, desert nation like Saudi Arabia. Although the government has promoted the upskilling of residents, it has also long faced a shortage of digital skills, and AI expertise is probably no exception.
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The barrage of announcements pertaining to AI has not yet been slowed down by those difficulties. Groq is constructing what it has branded the “world’s largest inferencing data center” in collaboration with Aramco Digital, Saudi Aramco’s digital and technology division.
According to Ross, its upstate New York-manufactured chips are specifically built for applying AI, or inference.
Earlier this year, the California-based technology company secured $1.5 billion in investment from Saudi Arabia to its expand its efforts. It is also supporting the development of the Saudi Data and AI Authority’s own large language model.
