Microsoft to Spend Over $10B in the Gulf Through 2030 on Cloud and AI
The company says pre-war commitments stand and are growing, with $400 million more set for subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East.
Tariq Benali Tariq Benali covers business and corporate news across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted, tracking the deals, leadership moves and regulatory shifts behind the region's companies. tariq@anecdoted.com
Microsoft plans to spend more than $10 billion across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait by 2030, with most of it going to cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. The spending covers continued buildout of the company's data centers and the expansion of its operations in the four countries.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice chair and president, said commitments made before the war with Iran are being honored and enlarged. He described the regional spending schedule as aggressive.
The money lands in a region that has spent years trying to turn itself into an AI hub. Gulf governments see compute as a route to diversify away from hydrocarbons and to draw in global technology companies. The war has also exposed how vulnerable that infrastructure is. Attacks damaged Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, turning data-center security from a planning exercise into an operating problem.
Resilience work with Gulf governments
Microsoft is working with Gulf states on readiness measures and on protecting critical data. Smith said the company ran resilience assessments alongside local partners during the first week of the conflict, which began on Feb. 28.
Connectivity is the other half of that effort. Microsoft will put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial links across the Middle East by 2030. Those routes carry cloud and AI traffic between Gulf countries and networks beyond them, and they determine how much regional capacity can actually be used.
The company declined to give a country-by-country breakdown of the $10 billion or to describe individual projects, citing security considerations.
Partnerships without new equity
Microsoft already holds ties to several regional AI players. It invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 in 2024 for a minority stake and board representation. It also collaborates with Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN and Qatar's Qai in selected areas. Smith said Microsoft does not intend to make capital investments in those two companies.
Rivals build their own positions
Nvidia has spread itself across computing, networking and AI software in the Gulf, working with HUMAIN, G42, Core42 and the Saudi Data & AI Authority.
Saudi Arabia has committed $40 billion to a national AI fund. HUMAIN plans AI factories with up to 500 megawatts of capacity and several hundred thousand Nvidia GPUs over five years.
In the UAE, Nvidia is part of Stargate UAE, a planned 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster within a broader 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus in Abu Dhabi.
AMD, Qualcomm, Groq and Cerebras are chasing opportunities in the region as well.
Capacity is only the first stage. As Gulf governments keep buying GPUs and building campuses, competition is shifting toward what the hardware is used for: converting compute into AI systems and applications that businesses and governments will pay to run.
