World Bank puts Saudi Arabia and the UAE ahead

The World Bank has put Saudi Arabia and the UAE ahead of the rest of the Middle East on the computers and skills needed to run new software tools, in a regional report covered on 6 October 2026. Arabic outlets gave the title as “From division to opportunity: artificial intelligence, jobs and growth.” The bank did not announce a fund, a contract or a ranking of apps in daily use. It ranked capacity. On that measure the two countries sit in the world’s top 25 for building models and for high-performance computing, the machines used to train and run them. They also lead the bank’s wider region, which includes North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in data-centre capacity. Pakistan has a large number of centres. The Gulf pair has the capacity. Fragile economies, the bank said, are still short of basic infrastructure and institutions. Middle-income economies sit in between: ambition and some technical skill, with gaps in putting the tools to work. The jobs lines are regional, not a Saudi or UAE result. The bank said the tools could lift productivity in up to 20 percent of jobs in the region, and that the near-term risk of jobs lost to automation is under 10 percent. That is a forecast, not a count of people hired or fired. A second set of figures cuts the other way. Only 16 percent of firms in the region launched a new product or service in the past three years, against 29 percent in similar economies. Only 24 percent invested in productive assets, against 37 percent. A country can own the machines and still have firms that do not use them. Talent is where the split shows up in people. The same October report, as carried by Masrawy, put net inflows of specialists in 2024 at 4.1 per 10,000 LinkedIn members in the UAE and 1.6 in Saudi Arabia. Egypt was at minus 0.9, with flows toward the Gulf, France, Britain and the United States. Al Bayan also noted a sharp rise in the UAE’s place on Stanford’s vitality index, and a top-25 spot on computing. An August World Bank development report had already named Falcon, built at Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute, among models trained in the country, and put the UAE high on use of ChatGPT relative to internet users. Those are earlier pages, not this October release. For a buyer in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, the useful reading is the gap between the machine room and the firm. National programmes have bought data centres, chips and research labs. The bank’s own firm survey says most companies in the wider region have not shipped a new product in three years. Leading the region on capacity is a real finding. It is not evidence that a hospital, a bank or a factory in either country has changed how Monday morning works. No cheque is attached. The 20 percent jobs line is a scenario. The top-25 slot is a rank, not a market share. LinkedIn flows are a platform sample. The 16 percent figure is the region, so it cannot be read as a Saudi or UAE failure on its own. If a later World Bank table splits firm use inside Saudi Arabia and the UAE from the regional average, the capacity lead can be tested. Until then the number that matters is products shipped, not megawatts installed.