The mega city project, which is touted as the city of the future of Saudi Arabia, can evolve in a completely different direction. Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk did not remain indifferent to this development. Musk gave a one-word response to Saudi Arabia's 170-kilometre linear city project “The Line” shared on the X platform, claiming that he could turn this huge space into an artificial intelligence data epicenter: “Interesting.”
This claim, shared on the prediction platform called Polymarket, soon found a wide resonance on social media, and Musk's short answer revealed how unusual the idea was.
The Line is at the center of Saudi Arabia's $500 billion NEOM project and aims to free the country's economy from oil dependence. However, speculation that a part of the project can be shifted to artificial intelligence infrastructure points to the race of global countries to build huge computing capacity for artificial intelligence. Saudi Arabia has also started to make serious investments in this ecosystem.
US technology giants, on the other hand, are already playing an important role in Saudi Arabia's artificial intelligence move. Nvidia (NVDA) supplies 18,000 Blackwell artificial intelligence chips for a 500-megawatt data center project linked to state-supported artificial intelligence company Humain. This stands out as one of the largest artificial intelligence infrastructure projects in the region.
On the other hand, Amazon's (AMZN) cloud unit AWS has committed to establishing a new cloud and data center region in Saudi Arabia with an investment of over $5.3 billion. Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) is also involved in the project. Google Cloud and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund have already announced plans to establish a $10 billion artificial intelligence center in the country to accelerate artificial intelligence development.
In addition, chip procurement agreements with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) show that Saudi Arabia has become an important buyer of artificial intelligence computing power.
For now, Musk's one-word response doesn't give much clues about this potential transformation, but it sets the scale of the idea of one of the world's most ambitious urban mega projects becoming the center of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
