Saudi’s $40bn for AI may not be enough

Saudi Arabia is launching a $40 billion fund to invest in the scorching hot market for AI. The proposed partnership between PIF, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, and Andreesen Horowitz, a top venture capital firm, dwarfs the typical size of funds that invest in early-stage tech companies. But experts say it’s a fraction of the investment needed to fully harness AI’s potential: Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, recently turned heads after it emerged he was seeking up to $7 trillion from the UAE to invest in AI chip infrastructure and data centres. Gulf states are competing to be first to convert cash from finite hydrocarbon resources into the oil of tomorrow: semiconductors. By the end of 2023, Saudi Arabia had bought about 3,000 specialist H100 chips from Nvidia, worth about $120 million in total. For comparison, OpenAI used 1,024 A100s, a slightly slower type of chip, to train its advanced ChatGPT3 model.