President Donald Trump is embarking on a trip this week to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, where his agenda includes Air Force One replacements, crypto deals, and the Gulf states’ desires for U.S. concessions on nuclear and microchip security restrictions. Yet lying in the background of this trip is a new strategic and technological reality: the Persian Gulf is quickly turning into China’s favorite testbed for the next-generation of digital infrastructure.
As a key part of China’s “Digital Silk Road 2.0,” the region’s richest capitals have signed a cascade of contracts with Chinese companies over the past two years that promise to deliver everything required for a 21st-century metropolis: cloud regions protected by local data-sovereignty laws, nationwide 5G cores, fleets of AI cameras, and the software to knit them all together. Huawei may be the best-known brand at the table, but it now arrives with an entire ecosystem of Chinese companies in tow: Alibaba, China Telecom, Dahua, SenseTime. Tencent, ZTE, and a growing roster of specialists that slot their equipment and algorithms into a single, Chinese-coded operating system for modern city life.
Each of Trump’s stops in the Gulf have seen major Chinese tech news in just the last few months:
- Qatar offered an initial glimpse of the model with the February unveiling of a strategic partnership with Huawei of a “smart campus” in Doha’s Media City that stores news footage and government data inside a sovereign cloud while facial-recognition gates control every doorway.
- Saudi Arabia has cleared the way for the Riyadh Cloud Region and a $400 million investment package from Huawei in the Fall of 2024 that folds neatly into Saudi Vision 2030 strategy.
- The United Arab Emirates, an early adopter of Chinese 5G, has for years been building a city-wide surveillance program with support and technology from Huawei and other Chinese tech firms like Hikvision and Dahua Technology. Officials in Dubai claim that this panopticon will allow police to phase out routine street patrols in favor of sensor-driven response teams.
Two selling points from the CCP resonate across all three monarchies. First, Chinese vendors are willing to customize technical architecture so that every byte of sensitive data remains on national soil—no small reassurance for governments wary of foreign subpoenas and often contrary to U.S. systems. Second, the financing is frictionless: instead of the continuing U.S. demands for investment dollars and business favors or even the former pattern of Chinese sovereign loans that once defined Belt and Road construction, today’s Chinese deals arrive as joint ventures or direct equity stakes. Thus, in contrast to the asks that Trump will be making, Chinese firms absorb much of the start-up cost, confident they will earn it back through long service contracts and user fees. Gulf officials, in turn, can announce rapid progress on economic-diversification targets, without adding debt to the balance sheet.
Behind these flagship projects, a dense web of ancillary partnerships is forming between tech firms in the Gulf and China. Alibaba Cloud and Saudi Telecom have spun up the Saudi Cloud Computing Company, whose twin availability-zone data centers in Riyadh already serve government ministries, financial institutions, retail chains, and upstream energy analytics. Tencent Cloud has pledged $150 million for the kingdom’s first dual-zone data center and is seeding the market with gaming, streaming, and social-media services optimized for regional bandwidth demands. SenseTime, teamed with the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s (PIF) AI arm, is exporting computer-vision toolkits while writing bilingual curricula that aim to train some 30,000 Saudi students in machine-learning fundamentals. Then there are China Telecom’s new Middle East points of presence, Dahua Technology (now partnered with PIF-backed ALAT) supplying a significant share of the region’s CCTV hardware, and ZTE’s fixed-wireless installations along desert highways. The result is a layered mesh of Chinese hardware and software extending from the Gulf’s submarine cables to its airport immigration kiosks.
This rapid speed of adoption owes much to politics. Beijing refrains from tying technology to governance reform, a stance Gulf leaders find refreshing after years of Western criticism about surveillance practices. Chinese diplomats reinforce the message at every summit, arguing that digital sovereignty is a right, and each state may patrol its own cyberspace as it sees fit. That language dovetails with domestic priorities in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, whose rulers, like the CCP, see data analytics and automated monitoring as essential to managing megaprojects and ensuring social stability. In return, Gulf capitals lend China public support in multilateral forums and act as early buyers for Beidou navigation, Chinese electric vehicles, and other strategic exports.
Gulf Security’s new architecture
The result not only runs counter to the narrative of close U.S.-Gulf cooperation, but also presents major security challenges. The United States bases many of its regional forces within or near the same urban areas now wired by Chinese gear. In Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, mobile operator VIVA has chosen Huawei to provision its nationwide 5G rollout, placing Chinese telecoms equipment on the very airwaves that serve the U.S. fleet’s base at Mina Salman. Near Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra Air Base, Emirati telecom engineers maintain 5G networks supplied by the same vendor, while satellite photos have already revealed Chinese construction at a nearby commercial pier.
American commanders now worry that civilian networks could become antennas for inadvertent—or intentional—collection of military signals. Gulf officials reply that layered firewalls and on-site inspection rights give them adequate control, and that strategic partnerships with the U.S. can coexist with commercial ties to China. Whether that balance holds under stress is an open question, but the political appetite to keep both options alive remains strong on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf.
These partnerships hold further implications not just in defense planning rooms, but in global standards bodies and export markets. As Gulf cities adopt Chinese protocols for everything from traffic-light control to digital-twin modeling of entire neighborhoods, they become reference customers whose endorsements carry weight across Africa, South Asia, and even parts of Europe. By underwriting SenseTime’s $207 million joint venture with the Public Investment Fund’s SCAI for the NEOM planned city, and a separate U.S. $100 million deal that installs Pony.ai’s autonomous-driving stack, Riyadh has hard-wired Chinese SDKs and APIs into NEOM’s digital operating system and given those interfaces a practical legitimacy that no white paper could achieve. If Riyadh later exports the model to allies in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Beijing’s code base will travel with it.
China’s Digital Silk Road has progressed from concept to concrete across the Gulf, rapidly stitching cloud regions, 5G cores, AI surveillance, and even autonomous vehicles into a single Chinese-coded fabric of urban life. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha welcome the arrangement because it promises local data sovereignty, turnkey financing, and political non-interference, while Beijing gains a network of reference customers whose endorsements help export its technical standards far beyond the Persian Gulf.
The United States still supplies the bulk of Gulf security, yet its presence now overlaps with Chinese telecom towers and cloud racks, a juxtaposition that complicates intelligence protection and crisis planning. For the moment, Gulf rulers believe they can preserve their American shield while buying Chinese digital tools, but every new contract shifts operational leverage, and perhaps strategic loyalty, incrementally eastward.
Whether this dual-track strategy is sustainable will depend on the answers to three questions in three regions. First, can Gulf leaders keep this balancing act going, not just in their security and investment policy, but how to handle high pressure scenarios, such as when Chinese smart-city grids are operating alongside sensitive U.S. military circuits amid some future crisis or even war? Second, how does Washington reckon with partners whose civilian infrastructure is not just run by, but is a key facilitator of the technology strategy of its own major strategic and trade competitor? Third, can Beijing convert its commercial footholds into something more, including overt military privileges?
The answers will shape the next phase of competition in the Middle East and beyond.
The China Intelligence is an occasional series that draws on open-source material to report on China and its military.
Tye Graham is a Senior Researcher with BluePath Labs and a retired U.S. Army Foreign Area Officer.
P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.
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