From Defense One, May 13:
Ubiquitous Chinese gear, infrastructure, and deals belie the narrative of close U.S.-Gulf cooperations—and raise grave security concerns.
President Donald Trump is embarking on a trip this week to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, where his agenda includes Air Force One replacements, crypto deals, and the Gulf states’ desires for U.S. concessions on nuclear and microchip security restrictions. Yet lying in the background of this trip is a new strategic and technological reality: the Persian Gulf is quickly turning into China’s favorite testbed for the next-generation of digital infrastructure.
As a key part of China’s “Digital Silk Road 2.0,” the region’s richest capitals have signed a cascade of contracts with Chinese companies over the past two years that promise to deliver everything required for a 21st-century metropolis: cloud regions protected by local data-sovereignty laws, nationwide 5G cores, fleets of AI cameras, and the software to knit them all together. Huawei may be the best-known brand at the table, but it now arrives with an entire ecosystem of Chinese companies in tow: Alibaba, China Telecom, Dahua, SenseTime. Tencent, ZTE, and a growing roster of specialists that slot their equipment and algorithms into a single, Chinese-coded operating system for modern city life.
Each of Trump’s stops in the Gulf have seen major Chinese tech news in just the last few months:
- Qatar offered an initial glimpse of the model with the February unveiling of a strategic partnership with Huawei of a “smart campus” in Doha’s Media City that stores news footage and government data inside a sovereign cloud while facial-recognition gates control every doorway.
- Saudi Arabia has cleared the way for the Riyadh Cloud Region and a $400 million investment package from Huawei in the Fall of 2024 that folds neatly into Saudi Vision 2030 strategy.
- The United Arab Emirates, an early adopter of Chinese 5G, has for years been building a city-wide surveillance program with support and technology from Huawei and other Chinese tech firms like Hikvision and Dahua Technology. Officials in Dubai claim that this panopticon will allow police to phase out routine street patrols in favor of sensor-driven response teams.
Two selling points from the CCP resonate across all three monarchies. First, Chinese vendors are willing to customize technical architecture so that every byte of sensitive data remains on national soil—no small reassurance for governments wary of foreign subpoenas and often contrary to U.S. systems. Second, the financing is frictionless: instead of the continuing U.S. demands for investment dollars and business favors or even the former pattern of Chinese sovereign loans that once defined Belt and Road construction, today’s Chinese deals arrive as joint ventures or direct equity stakes. Thus, in contrast to the asks that Trump will be making, Chinese firms absorb much of the start-up cost, confident they will earn it back through long service contracts and user fees. Gulf officials, in turn, can announce rapid progress on economic-diversification targets, without adding debt to the balance sheet.
Behind these flagship projects, a dense web of ancillary partnerships is forming between tech firms in the Gulf and China. Alibaba Cloud and Saudi Telecom have spun up the Saudi Cloud Computing Company, whose twin availability-zone data centers in Riyadh already serve government ministries, financial institutions, retail chains, and upstream energy analytics. Tencent Cloud has pledged $150 million for the kingdom’s first dual-zone data center and is seeding the market with gaming, streaming, and social-media services optimized for regional bandwidth demands. SenseTime, teamed with the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s (PIF) AI arm, is exporting computer-vision toolkits while writing bilingual curricula that aim to train some 30,000 Saudi students in machine-learning fundamentals. Then there are China Telecom’s new Middle East points of presence, Dahua Technology (now partnered with PIF-backed ALAT) supplying a significant share of the region’s CCTV hardware, and ZTE’s fixed-wireless installations along desert highways. The result is a layered mesh of Chinese hardware and software extending from the Gulf’s submarine cables to its airport immigration kiosks....
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