Miguel Afonso Caetano"Chinese firms have long sought a foothold in this market. In 2016, Alibaba formed a joint venture with the Saudi Cloud Computing Company. In 2025, Alibaba opened a new data center in Dubai. Huawei expanded its Gulf presence through domestic telecom partnerships and scaled its Riyadh cloud hub in 2023. Tencent is the latest entrant. While it started building its first data center in Bahrain in 2021, it scaled up cloud infrastructure in 2025 with a $150 million Saudi investment.
At the same time, competition in cloud infrastructure in the Gulf has become far more crowded than a simple U.S.-China battle.
Gulf countries have increasingly invested in their own data center infrastructure, reducing reliance on external providers. Across the region, telecom operators and state-backed firms are building local capacity.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are rapidly repositioning themselves as global AI hubs, investing tens of billions of dollars in data centers, smart cities, and digital infrastructure. Saudi Arabia expects AI to contribute around 12% of GDP by 2030, while the UAE aims to generate roughly $96 billion from AI over the same period. The region’s data center market is projected to nearly triple to around $9.5 billion by 2030.
Qatar’s Ooredoo has spun off its data center arm, Syntys, which operates facilities across multiple countries and recently expanded in Doha. Saudi Arabia’s STC and Kuwait’s Zain are also expanding colocation infrastructure to attract enterprise and hyperscaler demand.
Even if Chinese cloud providers benefit in the near term, they could only gain traction as “secondary or backup options, particularly for non-critical workloads and regional redundancy,” Manish Ranjan, research director for software and cloud at IDC, told Rest of World."
https://restofworld.org/2026/huawei-china-cloud-gulf-resilience-aws-strikes/
