AI and the UAE

WHEN US President Donald Trump descended on the Middle East last week, he brought with him the CEOs of a host of American tech companies. These included Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Palantir’s Alex Karp and many others. These CEOs got the chance to get close to those who rule Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar and negotiate deals. This led to what Trump loves best: the announcement of multibillion-dollar tech deals for US companies.

Money was at the heart of all this — America is, after all, a capitalist machine, and must be fed cold hard cash. At the same time, this was also a strategic victory for the US in its competition with China in the realm of AI. One deal that was finalised between Abu Dhabi and American AI giant OpenAI illustrates this. The deal was made to establish one of the world’s largest AI hubs in Abu Dhabi, with an investment of up to $500bn in infrastructure and projects. The planned facility will reportedly span over 25 square kilometres and require power equal to five nuclear reactors.

The story of how Abu Dhabi got here is interesting against the backdrop of international relations, strategy and the US-China stand-off over AI. The UAE project has been developed in conjunction with an Abu Dhabi-based tech conglomerate G42 and is a part of OpenAI’s Stargate project, which hopes to set up similar hubs all around the world. However, until recently, the US had not trusted G42 with OpenAI’s pioneering AI technology.

In 2023, G42 was headed by an executive of Chinese-origin, a fact that was brought up by the CIA when a UAE official visited the White House in 2023. It was also underscored that G42 had relationships with Chinese intelligence outfits.

Pakistanis should worry about AI’s move to the Gulf.

All this changed when G42’s new CEO announced that the company had almost entirely divested from China. With China out of the picture and the Gulf leaders interested in deploying AI for their own purposes, the market was well and truly opened for OpenAI. Therefore, last week when Trump traipsed into Abu Dhabi, he and OpenAI were also at the helm of a strategic victory. Whatever divestment the UAE had enabled from China, it appears to have been enough to mollify US concerns about the leak of AI technology into China. The stage was set for the unveiling of a massive data hub.

So the UAE (the Saudis and Qataris have arranged their own deals) is going to be the largest AI data hub in the region. It is also indicative of the hopes that Emirati rulers harbour about the use of AI within their professional and social environments.

It is well known that the UAE has an enormous guest-worker population that fills both low-skill construction and similar job slots and high-skill white-collar positions such as those in engineering and technology. The shift to AI could well make the UAE far less dependent on these migrant populations.

According to AI experts, jobs such as those of cashiers, data entry clerks, truckers and delivery people on the low-skilled end will vanish in the AI-led future. Similarly, software engineers and developers and other such tech workers will likely also be replaced by computers that can write code faster and with greater accuracy. Doctors, particularly those in specialised areas of medicine, such as radiology and pathology, could see their jobs disappear as computers analyse far more data about a patient’s condition and produce more accurate diagnosis than they ever can.

This move towards AI in the Gulf is something that Pakistanis need to be concerned about. Pakistan re­­lies on exporting blue-collar and whi­te-collar workers to the Gulf and Saudi Arabia and remittances from these workers are a crucial part of the country’s economy. They determine how people think of their children’s future and their education and the courses of study that young people choose to pursue. While Pakistan may not have deep AI penetration or even development in our local market at present, this is not the case for the global arena where we go to work.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries have, for a long time now, seen migrant labour as a problem to be solved, and they may have hit upon a solution that serves them well. All the subcontinental faces that one sees on visits to Riyadh and Dubai may see their days in these Arab places numbered once the new AI future of the Middle East, as envisioned by its rulers, is realised. In their view, if migrant workers can be replaced with AI, their countries can be reclaimed for their true natural-born citizens. The question is, what will countries like Pakistan do for their own citizens in a future where their export to labour markets in the Gulf will become a vastly limited option?

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2025