The first week of June was a study in two speeds. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh pushed their sovereign AI champions into new markets, banking for G42 and autonomous mobility for HUMAIN, while the OECD put a number on what a prolonged Gulf conflict could do to the whole build-out. Here is what moved between 1 and 7 June.
Abu Dhabi: G42 takes sovereign AI into global banking
On 3 June, G42 and Banco Santander signed a memorandum of understanding covering banking intelligence, agentic financial services and large-scale AI infrastructure. The structure is co-development rather than a vendor contract: Santander brings its global customer base and regulatory know-how, G42 brings the AI, cloud and infrastructure stack. Two G42 companies are expected to carry the work, Inception on the agentic side and Presight on applied AI.
The deal matters because it is the clearest sign yet that Abu Dhabi's AI champion is moving from building capacity at home to exporting it into regulated industries abroad. A bank with operations across Europe and the Americas is about as regulated as it gets. If the workstreams named in the MoU, including AI-enabled advisory and savings tools and a banking intelligence layer across Santander's operations, turn into production systems, G42 will have a reference customer that most sovereign AI ventures can only sketch in a pitch deck. The timing is also notable: AGBI reported this week that Gulf banks themselves face an AI talent bottleneck, which makes a packaged banking intelligence offer from a Gulf AI group an easier sell on both sides.
Riyadh: HUMAIN claims the robotaxi lane
At NVIDIA's GTC event in Taipei on 1 June, HUMAIN was named among the partners taking the DRIVE Hyperion platform into Level 4 robotaxi fleets, alongside Foxconn, Uber and Autobrains. The PIF-owned company will use the stack to develop robotaxi services for Saudi Arabia and the wider region, AGBI reports.
Read this as the application layer of a strategy that has so far been mostly about compute. HUMAIN's NVIDIA partnership already covers AI factories with capacity targeted at up to 500 megawatts and an initial 18,000-GPU Grace Blackwell deployment. A robotaxi fleet is the kind of visible, consumer-facing product that turns infrastructure spend into a story the public can ride in, and it fits the Kingdom's declared Year of Artificial Intelligence, with every ministry under instruction to put AI to work in 2026.
The OECD names the risk under all of it
The week's most important document came from Paris. In its latest Economic Outlook, published 5 June, the OECD warned that a prolonged Middle East conflict could delay or halt the Gulf's large AI infrastructure projects, AGBI reports. The argument is direct: multi-gigawatt data centre campuses are tied to sovereign wealth funds and state-backed capital, and both are exposed if the Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed and energy revenues stay disrupted.
The numbers are sobering. Even with a quick resolution, the OECD expects global growth to fall to 2.8 per cent this year from 3.4 per cent in 2025. In its dark scenario, with disruption running into late 2027, growth drops to 2.1 per cent in 2026 and 1.8 per cent the year after. For the AI build-out specifically, the report flags higher energy costs for data centres, knock-on effects on semiconductor supply, and the physical threat to sites after the March drone attacks on cloud facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. Before the war broke out in February, Knight Frank had forecast Middle East data centre growth of 63 per cent annually over the next two years. That forecast now carries an asterisk the size of the Gulf.
Quiet week elsewhere
Qatar's Qai had no fresh announcements this week and is still building out the $20 billion AI infrastructure joint venture with Brookfield it signed in December. Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman were quiet on sovereign AI moves, though all four feature in the OECD's warning by way of war repair bills now competing with technology budgets. Egypt and Morocco logged no major new commitments after Morocco's $1.28 billion Casablanca AI campus dominated last week's edition.
What to watch
Whether the G42 and Santander MoU names a first production deployment, how quickly HUMAIN moves from robotaxi announcement to a pilot city, and any sign that Gulf sovereign funds are re-phasing data centre capital in response to the OECD's scenario. The build-out has not slowed yet. The question this week put on the table is what happens if the war does not end soon.
