The Gulf’s trillion-dollar AI dream has a water problem
The Gulf’s trillion-dollar race to become an artificial-intelligence superpower faces the region’s biggest challenge: water.
Data centers powering AI across the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are consuming water at an alarming rate, with projections showing the region will need 426 billion liters annually by 2030. This surge threatens to turn water scarcity into a critical bottleneck for tech ambitions in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions.
The World Resources Institute ranks the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar among the most water-stressed countries on Earth, with daily per capita consumption exceeding 500 liters — almost three times the European average. The countries pledged $2 trillion of deals during U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East tour in May this year.
The UAE’s new 1-gigawatt Stargate AI campus, backed by OpenAI and Abu Dhabi’s G42, is only the beginning of a massive infrastructure build-out across the region. Saudi Arabia has separately announced plans for 2,200 megawatts of new data center capacity, attracting tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services to establish regional hubs.
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