Five years from now, the strongest indication that the Gulf’s artificial intelligence economy has reached maturity may be surprisingly simple: people will stop talking about AI infrastructure.
That is the view of Charles Chebli, Head of AI Cloud for the Middle East and Africa at Qualcomm. According to Chebli, the region is moving beyond debates over whether governments and businesses should adopt AI. The focus is increasingly shifting toward how AI can become a long-term strategic capability that improves productivity, strengthens competitiveness, supports innovation and creates new economic opportunities.
Chebli works with governments, enterprises and technology organisations across the region to turn AI ambitions into scalable programmes. His approach brings together infrastructure, data, cloud architecture and technology decisions with clearly defined business and public-sector objectives.
“AI is rapidly becoming foundational infrastructure,” Chebli says, arguing that dedicated regional leadership is needed to connect AI strategy with practical implementation and measurable results.
Turning AI Ambitions Into Practical Results
Chebli’s experience working across the technical and policy dimensions of AI adoption has led him to a central conclusion: the best technical solution is not always the easiest solution to deploy.
Governments may ask for sovereign AI infrastructure, while businesses may be interested in deploying large language models. But these requests are often only part of a broader objective.
For governments, the goal could be better public services. For businesses, it could mean higher productivity, faster innovation or the creation of new revenue streams.
Building advanced infrastructure alone does not guarantee those outcomes. Data quality, governance, operating models and organisational readiness can determine whether an AI investment produces meaningful results.
Chebli therefore advocates starting with the desired outcome and working backwards toward the technology. When that approach is followed, AI can move beyond being an isolated technology project and become a broader engine for transformation.
Digital Sovereignty Goes Beyond Data Centres
Digital sovereignty has become a major priority across the Gulf, but Chebli argues that sovereignty should not simply be measured by where computing infrastructure is physically located.
True sovereignty involves maintaining meaningful control over critical digital assets and decisions. That includes determining where data is stored, how AI models are trained and governed, who can access them and whether these capabilities can remain resilient over the long term.
The region is consequently moving from treating sovereignty as a policy ambition toward developing it as an operational capability.
Gulf countries are investing in more than computing capacity. They are also developing data ecosystems, AI talent, governance structures and cloud platforms designed to support greater independence.
Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and the UAE’s Core42 are examples of this broader shift, according to Chebli. Both organisations are contributing to the infrastructure and capabilities needed to develop, deploy and govern AI within the region.
AI Investment Is Increasingly About Efficiency
Chebli believes organisations that make successful AI investments tend to share an important characteristic: they invest to achieve a specific outcome rather than simply following the latest technology trend.
Before making large investments, organisations need to understand the quality and availability of their data, establish measurable definitions of success and assess the total cost of ownership.
The amount of computing capacity deployed is therefore not enough to determine whether an AI programme is successful.
Instead, organisations increasingly need to examine productivity improvements, service quality, new revenue opportunities and long-term strategic value. Energy efficiency, scalability, model lifecycle management and cost per outcome are becoming important considerations before infrastructure is deployed.
Why More Compute Does Not Always Mean More Value
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI infrastructure, Chebli says, is the assumption that additional computing power automatically produces additional value.
As AI systems become larger and more sophisticated, efficiency is becoming just as important as scale.
Organisations are increasingly looking at metrics such as performance per watt, cost per token, system utilisation and the efficiency with which data moves through computing infrastructure.
Another major challenge is what Chebli describes as the “AI memory wall.” Computing performance has advanced rapidly, but moving data between memory, storage and processing systems has emerged as an increasingly important limitation for both performance and cost.
This means the economic discussion around AI is changing.
The key question is no longer simply how much infrastructure costs. Instead, organisations need to understand how much it costs to achieve a particular outcome.
What a Mature Gulf AI Economy Could Look Like
Looking five years ahead, Chebli expects a mature sovereign AI economy in the Gulf to look very different from the infrastructure-focused landscape seen today.
The clearest sign of progress, he argues, will be that AI infrastructure itself becomes largely invisible.
AI will be integrated into government services, industrial operations and everyday business processes rather than treated as a separate initiative.
Citizens could receive faster and more personalised public services without needing to understand the technology behind them. Businesses could treat AI as a standard part of their operations, much like cloud computing and other established digital technologies are today.
At the same time, a stronger startup ecosystem could develop around the region’s AI capabilities. Instead of simply consuming AI infrastructure, startups could build new products and services on top of it, commercialise innovations and eventually export their expertise to international markets.
From AI Consumers to AI Creators
For Chebli, the ultimate measure of a sovereign AI economy is not how much computing infrastructure a country owns.
It is what that infrastructure enables.
A mature AI economy would allow countries to develop their own technologies, establish governance frameworks, commercialise AI capabilities and export innovation.
That would represent a fundamental shift from AI adoption toward AI creation.
The Gulf’s AI ambitions, therefore, are not simply about building larger data centres or deploying more powerful systems. They are about creating an ecosystem in which infrastructure, data, talent, governance and business models work together to produce measurable economic and societal outcomes.
If that transformation succeeds, AI may eventually become almost invisible.
And, according to Chebli, that could be the clearest sign that the Gulf’s AI economy has truly matured: AI will no longer need to be discussed because it will simply be how things get done.
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