Countering the Digital Silk Road: Saudi Arabia

Vivek Chilukuri and Ruby Scanlon

Source Link

The year 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of the Digital Silk Road (DSR), China’s ambitious initiative to shape critical digital infrastructure around the world to advance its geopolitical interests and technology leadership. A decade after its launch, digital infrastructure and emerging technologies have only grown more vital and contested as demand for connectivity, digital services, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) expand. Against this backdrop, the DSR has become increasingly central to China’s broader strategy to challenge and ultimately supplant the U.S.-led digital order, and in doing so, reap potentially vast security, economic, and intelligence advantages. To assess the DSR’s impact 10 years after its inception—and explore how the United States and its allies can offer a more compelling and coherent alternative—the CNAS Technology and National Security team has undertaken a major research project that produces in-depth case studies of four diverse and geostrategically critical nations—Indonesia, Brazil, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia—and culminates in a full-length report.

The fourth case study focuses on Saudi Arabia. For the study, researchers from the CNAS Technology and National Security team traveled to the country to interview U.S. and Saudi policymakers, personnel in technology firms, members of civil society, and academics. Drawing on these interviews and desk research, this case study seeks to shed light on the current dynamics and stakes of the U.S.-China competition to shape Saudi Arabia’s digital ecosystem.

Executive Summary

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the heavyweight of the Arab world and a rising global power. The kingdom boasts the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves and fourth-largest sovereign wealth fund. Besides Türkiye, it is the only trillion-dollar economy in the Middle East.1

Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia has gone all in on Vision 2030, an audacious initiative to diversify the petro-economy, modernize society, and expand the kingdom’s global influence. Technology is central to Vision 2030, and up to 70 percent of its goals involve data and artificial intelligence (AI).2 The kingdom views emerging technologies as essential to creating good jobs, indigenizing critical industries and supply chains, and realizing Neom, the crown prince’s trillion-dollar techno-region in the country’s northwest. For all of Riyadh’s ambition, its leaders recognize that they cannot achieve Vision 2030 without foreign technology partnerships.