The Gulf Sovereign AI Index 2026.

Why a Gulf-specific instrument

The six GCC states appear in every global AI ranking, and in most of them the region is read through the lens of two leaders. Oxford Insights' Government AI Readiness Index 2025 places Saudi Arabia 15th and the UAE 23rd of 195 governments, with Qatar 54th, Bahrain 58th, Oman 64th and Kuwait 90th ¹. The IMF's AI Preparedness Index spans 174 economies and puts the UAE at 0.63 and Saudi Arabia at 0.58, against a North American average of 0.74 and a European average of 0.63 ². These are useful anchors, but they are built for cross-regional comparison and say little about the three things that actually decide a sovereign AI programme in the Gulf: whether sovereign-grade compute exists in-country, whether capital is available at national scale, and whether the institutional and regulatory machinery can absorb it.

This index therefore does something narrower and more useful for operators in the region. It takes the best public measures available for each of five pillars, scores the six states against each other on a common 0–100 scale, and publishes the arithmetic. The result is a relative instrument: a score of 100 means 'best in the GCC on this indicator', not 'best in the world'. We regard that as the right frame for decisions that are, in practice, choices between Gulf jurisdictions.

The instrument: five pillars, fourteen indicators

Each pillar combines two to four indicators. Continuous indicators are min–max normalised across the six states to 0–100; bounded indicators (cybersecurity tier, data-protection status, national-model availability, investment-vehicle rubric) are scored on a published rubric; capacity indicators (megawatts, sovereign assets) are log-transformed before normalisation so that gigawatt and trillion-dollar figures do not mechanically zero out the smaller states. Pillar scores are the simple mean of their indicators; the overall score is the simple mean of the five pillars. Exhibit 1 lists every indicator and its source.

Two design choices deserve a note. We score operating hyperscaler regions rather than announced ones because sovereign programmes are built on capacity that exists; the announced pipeline (AWS Saudi Arabia in December 2026, Microsoft's Saudi region) is discussed in the compute section but not credited until general availability ⁵⁶. And we use the IMF index as a 'foundations' measure inside the Talent pillar rather than as a stand-alone pillar, because its four components (digital infrastructure, human capital, innovation, regulation) overlap with our other pillars; it earns its place as the broadest cross-country measure of absorptive capacity available.

Results: a two-speed Gulf

The UAE scores 94.7 and Saudi Arabia 88.8. Qatar, at 59.7, is a clear third. Bahrain (41.1), Oman (35.8) and Kuwait (18.3) form a second group. Exhibit 3 shows where each state earns its score: the UAE is first or joint-first on four of five pillars and fourth on governance; Saudi Arabia takes the governance pillar outright (100.0) and leads e-government adoption (6th in the world in the UN E-Government Development Index 2024) ⁴; Qatar's profile is governance-led (87.2) with mid-table compute (58.1) and adoption (48.8).

For Bahrain and Oman, the gap is not a policy story. Oman's Policy Capacity score in the Oxford Insights index (88.5) is the second highest in the GCC and above the UAE's (73.0); Bahrain's Public Sector Adoption score (83.4) is third in the region ¹. Both are 'role-modelling' Tier-1 states in the ITU Global Cybersecurity Index 2024 alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar ³. What separates them from the leaders is compute (no operating hyperscaler region in Oman; one in Bahrain, AWS, since 2019) and the absence of a disclosed national-scale AI compute programme, together with sovereign capital at least an order of magnitude smaller than the leaders'.

Compute & Cloud: three states have it, three do not

The compute pillar is where the Gulf divides most sharply. The UAE hosts operating regions from three of the four global hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, Oracle) ⁶⁷⁸; Saudi Arabia hosts Google Cloud (Dammam) and Oracle (Riyadh, Jeddah) ⁷⁸, with AWS's Saudi region due in December 2026 as part of a commitment of more than USD 5.3 billion first announced in March 2024, and Microsoft's Saudi region announced but not yet generally available at the time of writing ⁵⁶. Qatar hosts Microsoft and Google Cloud regions; Bahrain hosts AWS (2019); Oman and Kuwait host none as of October 2026 ⁶⁷⁸.

On national AI compute programmes, two states have announced gigawatt-class capacity. Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN, launched by the Public Investment Fund in May 2025, broke ground on two 100 MW sites in Riyadh and Dammam in August 2025 and is reported to target 1.9 GW by 2030; AWS and HUMAIN are separately building a dedicated 'AI Zone' of up to 50 MW by 2028 on which the Arabic model ALLaM will be served through Amazon Bedrock ⁵⁹. The UAE's Stargate UAE, announced in May 2025 by G42 with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco and SoftBank, is a 1 GW cluster inside a 5 GW UAE–US AI Campus envelope, with a first 200 MW phase scheduled for 2026 ¹⁰. Qatar's Ooredoo has committed USD 1 billion to expand national data-centre capacity to 120 MW within five years and hosts NVIDIA GPUs under a 2024 partnership; its Kuwaiti subsidiary opened Kuwait's first sovereign AI-enabled data centre (NVIDIA H200) in late 2025, without a disclosed capacity target ¹¹¹². The Middle East Institute estimates that Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar together plan 8–10 GW of AI-related compute ¹⁷.

Regulation & Governance: the region's strongest pillar, and Saudi Arabia's lead

Governance is the pillar on which the Gulf is most competitive globally and most evenly spread internally. Saudi Arabia scores 93.2 on Oxford Insights' Governance pillar, 7th in the world, and 92.0 on Policy Capacity ¹. Qatar (77.5 and 80.5) and Oman (62.0 and 88.5) are strong; the UAE's governance score (67.5) is pulled below its other pillars. Five of the six states sit in the ITU's top 'role-modelling' tier for cybersecurity; Kuwait is in Tier 3 ³.

Data-protection law is now in force in five of the six states: Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law (Royal Decree M/19 of 2021, amended 2023, in force from September 2023), the UAE's Federal Decree-Law 45 of 2021, Qatar's Law 13 of 2016, Bahrain's Law 30 of 2018 and Oman's Royal Decree 6 of 2022 ¹⁶. Kuwait relies on a regulator-issued Data Privacy Protection Regulation (CITRA, 2021) rather than a comprehensive statute, which we score at half marks. The IMF's Regulation & Ethics sub-index tells the same story from a different angle: the UAE (0.17) leads the Arab region, and the Arab Monetary Fund's June 2026 analysis identifies regulation and ethics as the region's weakest AI-preparedness dimension overall (regional mean 0.115 against 0.21 in North America) ².

Capital: the state investor is the AI investor

The Gulf's seven largest sovereign funds accounted for 43% of global sovereign-investor deal value in 2025, USD 119 billion, according to Global SWF's 2026 Annual Report ¹³. The UAE's institutions together hold roughly USD 2.5 trillion (ADIA about USD 1.18 trillion, ICD USD 429 billion, Mubadala USD 358 billion, ADQ USD 251 billion, plus smaller vehicles); Saudi Arabia's PIF holds about USD 1.2 trillion and the National Development Fund USD 115 billion; Kuwait's KIA about USD 1 trillion; Qatar's QIA about USD 580 billion; Oman's OIA and Bahrain's Mumtalakat are at least an order of magnitude smaller ¹³. Mubadala was the world's most active sovereign AI and digital-infrastructure investor in 2025 ¹³.

Capacity is not the same as commitment, so the pillar pairs sovereign assets with a rubric on dedicated AI investment vehicles. Saudi Arabia (HUMAIN, a PIF-owned national AI champion with multi-billion-dollar hyperscaler and chip partnerships, including the AWS AI Zone) and the UAE (a dedicated Abu Dhabi AI investment vehicle, MGX, alongside Microsoft's USD 15.2 billion UAE commitment announced in November 2025) score full marks; Qatar, whose QIA has publicly prioritised AI-related investment without a dedicated vehicle, scores half; Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain score a quarter ^59101314. Kuwait is the one state where the two indicators diverge sharply: trillion-dollar capacity, early-stage AI deployment.

Adoption: e-government depth and national models

Adoption combines the UN E-Government Development Index 2024 rank (Saudi Arabia 6th, UAE 11th, Bahrain 18th, Oman 41st, Qatar 53rd, Kuwait 66th) ⁴, Oxford Insights' Public Sector Adoption pillar (UAE 97.3, Saudi Arabia 88.6, Bahrain 83.4) ¹, and whether the state has released a national Arabic-capable foundation model. Three have: Saudi Arabia's ALLaM (SDAIA, now served through HUMAIN and Amazon Bedrock), the UAE's Falcon family (Technology Innovation Institute) and Jais (G42 / MBZUAI), and Qatar's Fanar (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology with Qatar Computing Research Institute) ¹⁵. Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait have not, and this single indicator accounts for more than two-thirds of Bahrain's adoption-pillar gap to the leaders, about half of Oman's and about a third of Kuwait's.

Sensitivity: how much the ranking depends on the weights

A composite is only as honest as its sensitivity test. Exhibit 8 re-runs the index under two alternative weightings. Qatar's third place and the membership of the second group (Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait) are stable under every weighting we tested. The top two are not: a governance-heavy weighting (40% Regulation & Governance, 15% each elsewhere) puts Saudi Arabia at 91.6 and the UAE at 90.8; a compute-heavy weighting (40% Compute & Cloud) widens the UAE's lead to 95.3 against 85.6. Under a governance-heavy weighting Oman (47.6) also overtakes Bahrain (47.1).