As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across the Gulf, attention is rapidly shifting from deploying AI tools to building sovereign ecosystems that give countries greater control over their data, infrastructure and technological future.
According to Andrew Chen, Vice President and Head of Platform & Products at Magna AI, the region’s AI journey is entering a new phase in which governance, accountability and national capabilities are becoming as important as computing power.
“The biggest gap we saw in our first year was between AI ambition and AI execution,” Chen said. “Most organizations understand the potential of AI. The harder challenge is deploying it securely, governing it effectively, and operating it at scale.”
While AI adoption is widespread across the GCC, many organisations are still struggling to move beyond pilot projects. Chen said governance frameworks must be embedded from the outset rather than added later, arguing that clear oversight and accountability structures are essential if AI is to scale safely. “Clear rules around oversight, escalation, and human responsibility do not slow AI down. They are what allow it to scale safely and credibly.”
A key element of sovereign AI, he added, is ensuring that technology reflects local languages, cultures and operational requirements rather than relying solely on global models. “There is an important difference between a model that can communicate in Arabic and AI that is designed for the linguistic, cultural and operational context in which governments and enterprises across the region actually work.”
To address that gap, Magna AI is working with Arabic.AI and Intella to deploy a sovereign Arabic large language model and dialectal voice AI on secure national infrastructure. The company says its platform supports both Arabic and English sovereign models while allowing access to frontier and open-source models through a common gateway.
Founded with its global operations headquarters in Riyadh, Magna AI has built a portfolio of six AI products spanning infrastructure, applications, security and compute exchange services, designed around a sovereign AI model. Through its academy and accelerator programmes, the company is also investing in executive training, certifications, startup support and joint innovation initiatives with regional partners.
The company is now extending the model beyond the Gulf. During its first year, it secured commitments in Malaysia, Taiwan and Pakistan. Projects include a 20MW sovereign AI data centre and a national AI compute exchange in Malaysia, a sovereign AI exchange in Taiwan, and a public-private partnership supporting AI development in Pakistan.
Chen believes the Gulf is becoming a global reference point for sovereign AI development because of its combination of ambitious investment and regulatory oversight. “The countries that own the infrastructure, platforms, talent and intellectual property behind that utility will capture the economic value it creates, strengthen their technological independence and build new industries around it.”
As AI agents begin taking on more decision-making and operational tasks, he argued that strong governance will become even more critical. “Agents should be onboard with the same rigor as a new employee, with well-defined roles, safeguards, and structured oversight,” Chen said.
Source: Khaleej Times