How China’s tech giants wired the Gulf
Ubiquitous Chinese gear, infrastructure, and deals belie the narrative of close U.S.-Gulf cooperations—and raise grave security concerns.
Tye Graham and Peter W. Singer | May 13, 2025
The China Intelligence China Middle East White House Industry
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.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/05/china-tech-giants-wired-gulf/405283/?oref=d1-homepage-top-story
