There is a new report going around among energy and technology leaders this month. Reuters Insights and Rystad Energy have published “Powering the AI Era,” a survey of 148 senior energy executives on how the industry will power the huge demand from AI data centres. It is a serious piece of work, and the headline numbers are worth a look. Data centre capacity grew 50 percent between 2023 and 2025, to 141 gigawatts. By 2030 it is on track to reach 262 gigawatts. That would use close to 1,300 terawatt hours of power a year, about 4.5 percent of all the electricity used in the world today. Most striking of all, spending on data centres hit 770 billion dollars in 2025, and for the first time it passed global spending on oil and gas production.

But read the report closely and you notice something. It surveyed people in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Yet across 32 pages, every regional comparison is just North America versus Europe. North America is confident, leans on gas, and worries about its old grid. Europe is more careful, leans on renewables, and backs them up with batteries. That is the whole map. The Middle East is in the survey, but it never shows up on a chart, never gets a quote, and never gets its own point of view. Neither does China, the one country building at anything close to America’s scale. The two biggest stories outside the United States are simply absent.

I want to be clear about one thing. This is not a criticism of the researchers. They used the data they had. It is simply an observation, made from my desk in Dubai, right in the middle of a region the map leaves out, about a blind spot in how this story is being told, and about who gets written into it. And the blind spot matters, because on the report’s own terms the Gulf holds a very strong hand.

Look at what the report says a winner needs. The single hardest problem, it says, is speed. Getting power to a site in months, not years. Nearly half of executives (46 percent) name this as the thing they find hardest to plan for. In the United States, the wait to connect a new project to the grid has grown from about six months in 2005 to four years or more today. The report’s conclusion is that the winners will be those who can deliver clean, reliable power at huge scale and at speed, using a mix of sources rather than betting on just one.

Now compare that with what is being built between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Stargate UAE, the campus led by G42, OpenAI and Oracle, is planned at 5 gigawatts. It is described as the largest AI campus anywhere outside the United States, and its first 200 megawatt stage is due to go live in 2026, powered by a mix of nuclear, solar and gas. In Saudi Arabia, Humain, the AI company owned by the Public Investment Fund, is aiming for 1.9 gigawatts by 2030 and has talked about growing toward 6.6 gigawatts, inside a 100 billion dollar national AI plan. The region also holds the world record for the cheapest solar power, with Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra plant priced at about 1.3 US cents per kilowatt hour, and a Saudi project going even lower. And the money is not borrowed from the story, it is helping to write it. Abu Dhabi’s MGX closed a 49 billion dollar AI fund this month and is part of the 40 billion dollar purchase of Aligned Data Centers, the biggest data centre deal ever.

Put simply, the Gulf has the exact mix the report says is hard to find anywhere else. Cheap solar. Available gas. A growing nuclear base. Sovereign money that can move fast. And a system where the state can clear land, permits and grid connection in a fraction of the time a developer waits in an American queue. The thing North American executives call their biggest problem, the grid, is the thing the Gulf can move on fastest.

There is one more piece the energy view misses completely, and it is the one I spend most of my working life on. The Gulf’s edge is not just cheap power and deep pockets. It also rests on the law. The advanced chips now arriving in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh do not come freely. They come with conditions set by United States export rules. To get them, G42 removed Huawei equipment from its data centres and sold off its Chinese technology holdings. The deals that let the chips flow also require the buyers to say how the chips will be used, to keep them secure, to keep sanctioned parties away from them, and, in the UAE’s case, to build a data centre in the United States for every one built at home. In other words, this compute is built on top of a set of rules, and being able to meet those rules is now as valuable as a low power price.

The second legal piece is data itself. Part of what draws the big cloud firms and their regional clients to the Gulf is that it now has a real framework for keeping data inside the country. The UAE has its Personal Data Protection Law from 2021. The Dubai International Financial Centre and Abu Dhabi Global Market have their own rules, close to Europe’s. Saudi Arabia has its own data protection law. And there are rules that keep sensitive banking and health records onshore. For a bank, a ministry or a hospital choosing where to run its systems, the question is rarely only how much power sits behind the rack. It is whose law covers the data, where it is allowed to go, and who can force it to be handed over. A report that counts only gigawatts cannot see that layer. Yet it is that layer that decides whether people trust the site enough to use it. Cheap solar and speed bring the customer to the door. The law is what convinces them to move in.

So why does none of this show up in the big report of the moment? Part of the answer is simple: the sample happened to lean West. But part of it is about reputation, and that is the part worth thinking about for anyone in this region who cares about influence. The stories told elsewhere shape where money, talent and trust go. When the document that boardrooms and ministries read frames the future of AI power as a fight between two Western camps, it quietly tells the reader who the serious players are. The Gulf can be building the largest campus outside America and still be missing from the map everyone else is using.

This is a familiar pattern for those of us who work on reputation here. The substance is often well ahead of the story. Barakah is producing nuclear power, sovereign funds are closing record deals, the world’s cheapest solar prices are being set here, and yet the region is still often seen as a buyer of other people’s technology rather than a builder of its own model. There is now a real third path taking shape. Not the American grid built on gas, and not the European grid built on renewables and storage, but a mix of its own: sovereign, well funded, and fast. It deserves to be named as one.

The point is not to complain about being left off a chart. It is to see that being written about, or not, is itself a kind of power, and that the region is now at a stage where it can shape the story rather than wait to be added to it. The infrastructure is arriving. The question is whether the story arrives with it.

Spending on data centres reached 770 billion dollars in 2025, and for the first time it passed global spending on oil and gas production. The report breaks that number down for North America and for Europe. The Gulf, now home to the largest AI campus outside the United States, does not appear once.

If the main map of the AI energy era can be drawn without the region on it, the problem is not the quality of what we are building. It is who holds the pen. Should the Gulf keep supplying the substance of the global AI story and let others tell it, or is it time the region wrote its own chapter?

Reuters Insights and Rystad Energy, Powering the AI Era, 2026.

OpenAI, Introducing Stargate UAE.

G42, Global Tech Alliance Launches Stargate UAE.

Arab News, PIF backed Humain secures up to 1.2bn dollars to expand AI infrastructure.

Data Centre Magazine, Humain Invests 3bn dollars in xAI as Saudi AI Data Centres Expand.

PV Tech, Abu Dhabi claims record low solar tariff for 2GW Al Dhafra project.

The National, Abu Dhabi’s AI investment firm MGX raises 49bn dollars for new fund.

Data Center Dynamics, Aligned Data Centers sold to BlackRock and MGX in record 40bn dollar deal.

Bloomberg and Reuters, US approves Nvidia AI chip exports to the UAE.

Fortune and Rest of World, G42 cuts ties with China to clear US chip access.

UAE Government, Personal Data Protection Law 2021, and the DIFC and ADGM data protection regimes.

Saudi Data and AI Authority, Personal Data Protection Law.

Common Ground reaches around 1,500 senior legal, governance, risk and communications professionals across the GCC, UK and wider MENA region. One sponsor per issue, clearly labelled. See rates and availability.

I advise boards and executive teams on reputation, disclosure and communications risk. Get in touch.