Saudi Arabia, UAE race to buy Nvidia chips to develop AI

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity, Report informs referring to the Financial Times.

The Gulf powerhouses have publicly stated their goal of becoming leaders in AI as they pursue ambitious plans to turbocharge their economies. But the push has also raised concerns about potential misuse of the technology by the oil-rich states’ autocratic leaders.

According to people familiar with the moves, Saudi Arabia has bought at least 3,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips - a $40,000 processor described by Nvidia chief Jensen Huang as “the world’s first computer [chip] designed for generative AI” - via the public research institution King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust).

Meanwhile, the UAE has also secured access to thousands of Nvidia chips and has already developed its own open-source large language model, known as Falcon, at the state-owned Technology Innovation Institute in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi.

“The UAE has made a decision that it wants to… own and control its own computational power and talent, have their own platforms and not be dependent on the Chinese or the Americans,” said a person familiar with Abu Dhabi’s thinking.

“Importantly, they have the capital to do it, and they have the energy resources to do that and are attracting the best global talent as well,” the person added.

According to multiple sources close to Nvidia and its manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the chipmaker will ship about 550,000 of its latest H100 chips globally in 2023, primarily to US tech companies. Nvidia declined to comment.

In Saudi Arabia, Kaust will receive 3,000 of these specialist chips, worth about $120 million in total, by the end of 2023, according to two people close to the university’s AI labs.

By comparison, estimates suggest OpenAI trained its advanced GPT-3 model on 1,024 A100 chips - the predecessor to Nvidia’s latest chips - in just over a month.

The Saudi university, which, according to people close to Kaust, also owns at least 200 A100s, is building a supercomputer, Shaheen III, that will become operational this year. The machine will run 700 Grace Hoppers, Nvidia’s so-called superchips, designed for cutting-edge artificial intelligence applications.

Kaust will use these chips to build its own large language model - software that can generate humanlike text, images and code - similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the popular chatbot ChatGPT, according to multiple sources close to the state-owned university.

The Saudi LLM is being developed by the Provable Responsible AI and Data Analytics lab at Kaust, which is primarily staffed by Chinese researchers.