Saudi Arabia has asked the Gulf to treat computing the way it treats electricity. At the 30th meeting of the GCC Ministerial Committee for Post and Telecommunications in Bahrain on Sunday, Communications and Information Technology Minister Abdullah Alswaha called for a shared, sustainable digital network and pooled computing power across the six states, and the Kingdom submitted a proposal to the GCC General Secretariat and the bloc’s rotating presidency for digital interconnectivity modeled on the GCC electricity interconnection network. The analogy carries the substance. The electricity grid lets members trade surplus power and lean on each other under stress; a digital equivalent would do the same with bandwidth and compute, and the member with the largest surplus anchors the system.
Alswaha arrived with the surplus itemized. The Kingdom has added more than 8.4 terabits per second of international capacity, lifting its total to 18 terabits, an increase of about 80 percent. It has made sites and 14 gigawatts of power capacity available for data centers serving the Kingdom, the Gulf, the wider region and markets beyond. Its data center capacity has grown from 68 megawatts in 2021 to more than 467 megawatts in the first quarter of 2026, backed by investment above SR56.2 billion, about $14.9 billion. The numbers function as collateral: a pooled Gulf compute market would form around whoever holds the power, the land and the cables, and the proposal comes from the member that holds all three.
The minister framed the next phase as a move from digital resilience to leadership in artificial intelligence, with GCC states operating as one integrated Gulf ecosystem across data, computing, cloud services and AI. Data sovereignty ran through the remarks: the point of a Gulf network is that Gulf data stays on Gulf infrastructure, under Gulf rules, while the bloc’s companies compete globally from that base. The framing converts a security concern into an industrial strategy. Dependence on infrastructure located elsewhere is a price the region has paid in other sectors; the proposal prices the alternative.
The market logic leans on scale the bloc already has. Alswaha put the GCC’s count of unicorn companies above 20 and its share of the region’s venture capital near 95 percent, and called for open markets and harmonized standards to match. The pitch repeats a pattern visible elsewhere in Saudi economic diplomacy this month: at the GCC industrial forum, the Kingdom presented its energy, industry and mining consolidation as the base layer of a regional strategy. The method is consistent. Build the capability at home, then offer the bloc membership in it, with the Kingdom as the hub by arithmetic rather than by negotiation.
The incentives differ by member. For smaller states, pooling cuts the cost of duplicating compute that their own demand may never fill. For Riyadh, interconnection converts a domestic buildout, the 467 megawatts already running and the hyperscaler cloud regions scheduled to come online this quarter, into regional demand with better economics. The unresolved question is one the electricity grid never had to answer: power flows are neutral, data is not. Whose rules govern pooled data, and who certifies sovereignty inside a shared network, will have to be settled in the agreement before it can be settled in the engineering.
The proposal now sits with the General Secretariat and the rotating presidency. The measure of movement is whether it returns as a program with capacity-sharing pilots attached, and whether the bloc’s next communique carries the electricity analogy forward. The anchor capacity already exists. What the Gulf decides is whether to plug in.