With The Purchase Of Chips With China And The United States To Reveal The Artificial Intelligence Ambitions Of Saudi Arabia And The UAE

With the purchase of chips with China and the United States to reveal the artificial intelligence ambitions of Saudi Arabia and the UAE

As a strong country in the Gulf area, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have joined the global artificial intelligence (AI) military reserve competition, and are purchasing thousands of high -performance British chips that are vital to build AI software.The AI chip is currently a more popular product in Silicon Valley, and its supply is being squeezed by the global AI competition.

In order to accelerate economic development and transformation, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are seeking ambitious AI programs.They have launched their respective national AI strategies, and publicly declared that their goal was to become global leaders in the AI field.However, the pursuit of AI in the Gulf country has also aroused concerns about this technology.

People familiar with the matter revealed that Saudi Arabia has purchased at least 3,000 Nvidia H100 chips through KAUST University of Science and Technology (KAUST).The chip is priced at $ 40,000 and was known as the world's first computer chip designed by Nvida CEO, Jensen & Nbsp; Huang.

Figure ｜ Nvidia H100 sells for $ 40,000

At the same time, the UAE has also purchased thousands of Nvidia chips, and has developed its own open source language model Falcon (Falcon) in the State -owned Science and Technology Innovation Research Institute of Malaysia, Abu Dhabie.

The UAE has made a decision that it hopes to have and control its own computing power and talents, and own its own platform, rather than rely on Chinese or Americans. A person who is familiar with the UAE government said that it is important that they have done soCapital and energy resources are also attracting outstanding talents in the world.

Hedu China and the United States grabbing chip

While purchasing a large number of Nvidia chips through the state -owned group through the Gulf State, the world's leading technology companies are also eager to obtain these scarce AI chips.

According to last week, Chinese Internet giants have ordered $ 5 billion in Nvidia chips.According to various sources, Baidu, Bytes, Tencent and Alibaba have issued orders worth $ 1 billion in Nvidia, purchased about 100,000 A800 chips, and delivered this year.Due to the restrictions taken by the US government, Chinese companies can only purchase A800 processors, and its performance is slightly weaker than Nvidia's cutting -edge A100 chip.In addition, they also purchased a graphic processor worth $ 4 billion and delivered in 2024.

Figure ｜ Chinese company ordered $ 5 billion AI chip

So far, the world's advanced large language models are owned by American companies such as OpenAi and Google.They are also the main buyers of Nvidia   H100 and A100 chips.H100 is Nvaida's new chip, and A100 is its previous generation chip.

According to a number of people who are close to Nvidia and their chip -industry industry, the founding of the industry, Nvidia will ship about 550,000 new H100 chips to the world in 2023, mainly supplied to American technology companies.Nvidia refused to comment on this.

Gulf countries are also buying chips.According to two people close to KAUST, before the end of 2023, the university will obtain 3,000 H100 professional chips for a total value of about 120 million US dollars.How many chips are there?It is expected that OpenAI uses 1024 A100 chips to train advanced GPT-3 models in just over a month.

People familiar with the matter said that Saudi Kaust also has at least 200 A100 chips, which is developing a super computer called Shaxin III and will be put into operation this year.This machine will be equipped with 700 Nvidia super chip Grace & Nbsp; Hopper, which is designed for cutting -edge AI applications.

Gulf AI big model

According to various sources, Saudi Kaust will use these chips to develop autonomous large language models.This large model is similar to Openai's GPT-4, which can generate human text, pictures and code.At present, GPT-4 drives popular chat robots ChatGPT.

Saudi Arabia's large language model is developed by the internal trusted AI and data analysis laboratory (Prada & Nbsp; LAB), which is mainly composed of Chinese researchers.People familiar with the matter said that many Chinese people with AI professional knowledge chose to work in KAUST because they graduated from Chinese universities on the American entity list and were banned from studying and working in the United States.KAUST has not yet commented.

In addition to Saudi Arabia, another UAE in the Gulf area is also actively deploying AI.In 2017, the UAE became the first country to establish the AI department.In order to strengthen the global status of the UAE as a pioneer in the field of technology and AI, and restrict the negative use of technology, the UAE has launched a generation AI guide.

Earlier this year, the UAE's Falcon Grand Language Model was trained by 384 A100 chips within two months, and now it can be obtained for free online.Considering the resources they use, this big language model left a deep impression on me.For a while, it is one of the better models in the open source world.A well -known AI researcher and big language model expert said.

Figure ｜ Big Falcon Language Model in the UAE

According to a sovereign wealth investor in the UAE, the Falcon Grand Language Model also impressed the well -known venture capitalists such as Marc & Nbsp; Andreessen, and the latter tried to establish contact with the team.Anderson's spokesman refused to comment.

A person at the UAE Industry Development Agency said that the UAE government has purchased a new bilateral Nvida chip in order to prepare for more large language models and cloud services.

Western AI leaders and human rights experts are worried that software developed by these two countries may lack moral guardrails and security functions that large technology companies try to add in technology.

Oil dollar

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have strong financial support.After last year's energy prices soared, Saudi Arabia and the UAE made a lot of money by the US dollar (earning dollars earned US dollars in the sale of oil).Both countries have managed some global and more active sovereign investment funds.

The CEO of the two European AI companies said that the representatives of the Gulf National Fund exposed to Western AI startups and tried to obtain code and large language model expertise by providing computing resources, but they were rejected.

We have received a proposal for huge financing and data access, and their purpose is to indirectly obtain our talents.One of the CEOs said.

In June of this year, Openai & Nbsp; CEO Sam & Nbsp; Altman praised the foresight of the UAE during his visit to the Gulf area and believed that the country recognized the importance of AI in advance.He said in the Q & A session held in Abu Dhabi Financial District that the Gulf area can play a core role in global dialogue around emerging technologies and its supervision.

Before the AI was hot, there was a discussion about AI here, especially in Abu Dhabi. Aldman said that everyone is chasing the trend of AI now, which makes us very excited, but we have to thank those who are in everyone in everyone.Everyone thinks that when AI will not develop, people are talking about this problem.Fenghuang.com's "AI Outpost" will continue to pay attention to this.