Saudi Arabia expects to get access to Nvidia's high performance chips 'within the next year'

Saudi Arabia is optimistic about gaining access to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia's high-performance chips, which would enable it to develop and operate the most advanced artificial intelligence models.

Speaking to CNBC on Thursday, a top official at the Saudi Data and AI Authority, Abdulrahman Tariq Habib, said the kingdom expected to make such a stride in the next year.

"I think within the next year," Habib, Deputy CEO of SDAIA's strategy management office, told CNBC's Dan Murphy after being asked about a potential timeline. It's a significant expectation given that the United States' strict export controls have thus far prevented the chips' export to the kingdom. Habib made the comments on the sidelines of GAIN, Saudi Arabia's international AI summit, which took place in Riyadh this week.

It "will mean a lot" for Saudi Arabia to have access to the chips, Habib said — in this case, the Nvidia H200s, the firm's most powerful chips, which are used in OpenAI's GPT-4o.

"It will ease business between Saudi and U.S.," he said. "It will also open a lot of doors for building the capability, the computational capabilities, in the kingdom. But most importantly, it's not only the computational capability that's important. We worked hard in the past three years in building capacity, in human capacity, we also build data capacity as well. So we are working and collaborating with all [of the] international community and contributing [to] be one of the top active countries in data analysis."

Saudi Arabia is pouring considerable investment into developing a robust AI ecosystem in the kingdom, disclosing in a report by SDAIA that it aims to have AI make up 12% of its gross domestic product by 2030. According to the report, published on Sept. 9, the