Saudi Arabia Takes Top-10 Slots Across AI Measures in 70-Nation Ranking

Saudi Arabia took top-10 positions across a wide set of artificial intelligence measures in the IMD World Digital and AI Ranking 2026, published by the International Institute for Management Development, which assessed 70 economies.

The Kingdom ranked second globally on two corporate security measures: awareness of AI-related cybersecurity risks, and efforts to protect sensitive data inside AI systems. It placed fourth worldwide for implementing its national AI strategy, for corporate AI adoption and for public access to AI technologies.

Four fifth-place finishes followed: overall AI adoption, public trust in AI, AI regulatory frameworks and corporate investment in AI. Saudi Arabia ranked seventh for AI skills, for cities using AI to improve service quality and for corporate work on algorithm bias. It came eighth for AI readiness, ninth for private-sector AI investment and 11th for AI and capital investment.

The spread is uneven, and the pattern is informative. The country scores highest where state policy and corporate practice meet — security, strategy execution, deployment — and lower on measures that depend on a deeper pool of trained people and a longer record of private investment. Skills and private capital are the weaker links in the same table.

For a government that has placed AI near the centre of its industrial policy, the table works as an external check on how fast spending and rulemaking have turned into practice. Trust, regulation and corporate spending are the fifth-place measures; they are also the ones that decide whether adoption spreads past the first wave of adopters.

Those results track a wider push to develop a domestic data and AI ecosystem, lift national readiness and extend adoption across sectors, alongside work to build homegrown capability, draw in investment and tighten the rules governing the technology. All of it feeds the country's competitiveness aims and its Vision 2030 programme.

Economies were scored against 88 criteria — 51 hard statistics and 37 measures drawn from the IMD Executive Opinion Survey — grouped into Governance, Technology & Infrastructure, Efficiency, Workforce Development, and Values.

The United States finished first overall, a position the study attributes largely to its technology ecosystem and commercial capacity. Singapore took second and the Netherlands third, with Denmark fourth, Sweden sixth, Finland eighth and Switzerland ninth. China placed seventh.

China's technological strength, as the ranking describes it, rests on political will, efficient practice and agility. Its digital governance indicators were weak — a category that rewards transparent regulation protecting consumers and citizens. China still finished first in Efficiency and second in Technology & Infrastructure.

European economies in the top 10 ran the opposite pattern, built around consumer protection, fairness and safety. The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland all reached the global top 10 on the Governance factor. Switzerland, ninth overall, was 13th on Governance, just outside the group. On the Digital & AI Governance subfactor, Finland led, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

Among companies, Nvidia retained first place in a separate 2026 AI Maturity Index of the world's largest public companies. Alphabet, Microsoft, SoftBank Group and Samsung Electronics followed in that order.