GCC governments, notably Abu Dhabi, Doha and Riyadh, are each building parts of a “sovereign tech stack”, covering sovereign AI ambitions, sovereign-cloud offerings, large-scale data-center capacity and data governance regimes, typically underpinned by strategic partnerships with global hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, AWS, NVIDIA and others.
National strategies prioritize sovereignty and economic diversification, but there is also pragmatic cooperation in areas like cross-border cloud trade, and talent deals where scale economics, data residency, and critical-infrastructure standards create clear incentives to align.
Intersecting interests
By 2025, the Gulf’s three major tech movers, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Riyadh, had striven to secure sovereign computing and AI capacity, localize sensitive data, attract investments from global tech firms, and develop local AI talent.
Deloitte’s 2025 analysis of Gulf SWF and AI strategy emphasizes that SWFs act as both capital providers and securers of partnership models with global tech firms to accelerate capacity building and capability expansion.
Sovereign investors across the MENA are on track to lift their combined assets to around $8.8 trillion by 2030, according to the latest Global SWF report.
GCC SWFs currently manage $6 trillion in assets under management ( AUMs) or over 40 percent of the world’s SWF assets. They deploy vast amounts of capital across the globe, having been mandated to preserve wealth, economically diversify away from hydrocarbons, and secure high ROI.
According to the 2025 Global SWF report, the most active investors were Mubadala with $17.4 billion, ADIA with $9.6 billion, QIA with $7.6 billion, PIF with $6.2 billion, and ADQ, with $4.8 billion.
Profitable returns from these investments are deployed domestically in favor of developing national and digital transformation plans, funding mega projects, and fostering innovation ecosystems and job creation.
State-owned investments account for about 40 percent of sovereign investor deals in 2025.
Meanwhile, private markets are luring institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), and family offices worldwide, with global financial data provider Preqin projecting their value will rise from $18 trillion in 2024 to over $29 trillion by 2029.
Nowhere is this evolution more pronounced than in the Middle East, where a surge in secondary markets, the rise of co-investments, and the adoption of innovative fund structures are all testament to markets being increasingly collaborative, sophisticated, and attuned to the needs of a diverse investor base.
David Nally, Group Managing Director of Geneire, a turnkey solutions provider for the oil and gas sector, notes that strategic collaboration among governments, investors, and tech giants “is driving the growth of digital infrastructure in the GCC.”
In the Middle East, where ambitious economic diversification agendas and a strategic focus on sectors such as energy infrastructure, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence (AI), nearly 80 percent of investors plan to increase their private equity allocations in the next 12 months, with almost half already allocating more than 20 percent of AUMs to these asset classes, according to Preqin.
Middle Eastern LPs are increasingly using their scale to negotiate bespoke fee structures, influencing global fund terms. Regional LPs and GPs are embracing secondaries and continuation vehicles to unlock early liquidity and manage longer holding periods. According to Preqin’s 2025 Middle East Investor Survey, LPs are increasingly seeking flexible structures and clearer exit prospects.
Around 80 percent of Middle East LPs plan to increase private equity allocations, according to Preqin.
Infrastructure deal value in EMEA grew by 10 percent in 2024, with the Middle East as a key driver, according to a 2025 McKinsey report, while data center returns in the region exceeded 11 percent in 2024, outpacing traditional real estate sectors.
Deloitte highlights consistent themes across capitals: sovereign control, economic diversification, digital transformation and strategic partnership frameworks that balance foreign know-how with local ownership.
PwC’s mid-2025 work on infrastructure projects estimates the Middle East will triple data-center capacity from ~1GW to ~3.3GW over the next five years.
Regulatory drivers such as national rules requiring local storage of financial and personal data in Saudi and similar guidance in other GCC states can create natural interoperability requirements, including how to certify sovereign-cloud, secure cross-border data transfers, and audited app deployment and network settings, all pushing for shared as opposed to isolated standards.
Technical and compliance challenges are pushing GCC countries toward common governance constructs and vendor frameworks.
Converging parallels, shareable specializations
In November 2025, Reuters showed that hyperscaler and SWF deals were visible patterns in Saudi, Abu Dhabi and Doha, indicating that the same basic components were being deployed or cloned in each country: sovereign cloud instances, certified data centers, and localized AI compute.
The scene is certainly set for great achievement. Maqbool Al Wahaibi, CEO of Oman Data Park, envisions the potential for a hyperscaler to emerge from the MENA region, “given the available capital, will, and talent.”
Yet, it seems that duplication in this instance is best avoided.
The region benefits from shared fiber, subsea routes and peering hubs linking Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha to reduce latency and improve resilience, according to a McKinsey and PwC analysis.
When it comes to shared certification frameworks and sovereign-cloud standards, common auditing, encryption, cross-border access control compliance protocols let each country retain policy control while enabling cross-border cloud services for regional firms.
GCC countries can share their specialized roles. Saudi’s powerful cluster of servers for complex, parallel tasks like AI/deep learning, scientific simulations, and high-end 3D rendering, Abu Dhabi high-security government cloud and specialized AI labs, and Qatar’s niche high-performance computing (HPC) and telecommunications infrastructure can interoperate, reducing wasteful duplication and accelerating time-to-market.
PwC’s 2025 capacity forecasts support concentrating certain expensive assets rather than cloning them across every market.
Working towards a regional sovereign ecosystem?
The key friction areas towards producing a regional sovereign ecosystem reside in different data-security laws and procurement rules, alternating strategies favoring either domestic champions or foreign expertise, visa regimes and talent pipelines.
Deloitte and McKinsey emphasize that AI talent is a scarce, mobile resource whose supply will determine how effectively projects can be synchronized regionally.
The GCC can start adopting cross-jurisdictional regulatory sandboxes and mutual recognition agreements for sovereign-cloud certifications so that services validated in one jurisdiction are accepted by partners in another.
To boost talent mobility, GCC SWFs can underwrite regional AI academies, and visa standardization for tech talent.
“GCC states are prioritizing AI, with a focus on human-centric policies and international cooperation to shape responsible AI,” according to a September 2025 statement by Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
“GCC states’ investments in this sector have reached tens of billions of dollars…with ambitious plans to increase these investments to hundreds of billions by 2030.”
Success towards a regional tech sovereign remains a complex endeavor requiring at least two concrete enablers: mutual regulatory recognition and talent mobility, a coordinated effort that transcends local aspirations for protected dominion and sector dominance.
