As a key part of 
“Digital Silk Road 2.0,” the Gulf states have signed a cascade of contracts with companies including Huawei, Alibaba, China Telecom, Dahua, SenseTime, Tencent, ZTE, and a growing roster of specialists, 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 into a single, Chinese-coded operating system for modern city life.
* in Feb, Qatar unveiled a strategic partnership with Huawei on 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 $400M investment package from Huawei in 2024 that folds neatly into Saudi Vision 2030 strategy.
* The UAE, an early adopter of 5G, has for years been building a city-wide surveillance program with support and technology from Huawei, Hikvision, Dahua, etc. Dubai officials claim that this panopticon will allow police to phase out routine street patrols in favor of sensor-driven response teams.
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 $150M 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.
* China Telecom’s new Middle East points of presence
* Dahua (now partnering with PIF-backed ALAT) supplying a significant share of the region’s CCTV hardware
* ZTE’s fixed-wireless installations along desert highways
The result is a layered mesh of hardware and software extending from the Gulf’s submarine cables to its airport immigration kiosks.
Gulf states lend China public support in multilateral forums and act as early buyers for Beidou navigation, Chinese EVs, and other strategic exports.
These partnerships hold further implications in global standards bodies and export markets. As Gulf cities adopt protocols for everything from traffic-light control to digital-twin modeling of entire neighborhoods, they become reference customers whose endorsements carry weight across Africa, South Asia, and even parts of Europe.
By underwriting SenseTime’s $207M JV with the Public Investment Fund’s SCAI for the NEOM planned city, and a separate US $100M deal that installs Pony.ai’s autonomous-driving stack, Riyadh has hard-wired SDKs and APIs into NEOM’s digital operating system and given those interfaces a practical legitimacy that no white paper could achieve. If Riyadh later exports the model to allies in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Beijing’s code base will travel with it.
China’s Digital Silk Road has progressed from concept to concrete across the Gulf, rapidly stitching cloud regions, 5G cores, AI surveillance, and even autonomous vehicles into a single Chinese-coded fabric of urban life. Beijing has been gaining a network of reference customers whose endorsements help export its technical standards far beyond the Persian Gulf.
defenseone.com/threats/2025/0
“Digital Silk Road 2.0,” the Gulf states have signed a cascade of contracts with companies including Huawei, Alibaba, China Telecom, Dahua, SenseTime, Tencent, ZTE, and a growing roster of specialists, 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 into a single, Chinese-coded operating system for modern city life.
* in Feb, Qatar unveiled a strategic partnership with Huawei on 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 $400M investment package from Huawei in 2024 that folds neatly into Saudi Vision 2030 strategy.
* The UAE, an early adopter of 5G, has for years been building a city-wide surveillance program with support and technology from Huawei, Hikvision, Dahua, etc. Dubai officials claim that this panopticon will allow police to phase out routine street patrols in favor of sensor-driven response teams.
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 $150M 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.
* China Telecom’s new Middle East points of presence
* Dahua (now partnering with PIF-backed ALAT) supplying a significant share of the region’s CCTV hardware
* ZTE’s fixed-wireless installations along desert highways
The result is a layered mesh of hardware and software extending from the Gulf’s submarine cables to its airport immigration kiosks.
Gulf states lend China public support in multilateral forums and act as early buyers for Beidou navigation, Chinese EVs, and other strategic exports.
These partnerships hold further implications in global standards bodies and export markets. As Gulf cities adopt protocols for everything from traffic-light control to digital-twin modeling of entire neighborhoods, they become reference customers whose endorsements carry weight across Africa, South Asia, and even parts of Europe.
By underwriting SenseTime’s $207M JV with the Public Investment Fund’s SCAI for the NEOM planned city, and a separate US $100M deal that installs Pony.ai’s autonomous-driving stack, Riyadh has hard-wired SDKs and APIs into NEOM’s digital operating system and given those interfaces a practical legitimacy that no white paper could achieve. If Riyadh later exports the model to allies in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Beijing’s code base will travel with it.
China’s Digital Silk Road has progressed from concept to concrete across the Gulf, rapidly stitching cloud regions, 5G cores, AI surveillance, and even autonomous vehicles into a single Chinese-coded fabric of urban life. Beijing has been gaining a network of reference customers whose endorsements help export its technical standards far beyond the Persian Gulf.
defenseone.com/threats/2025/0