The Gulf Is Building the AI Economy. Its Neighbours Are Training the Talent.
The Gulf is spending billions to become a global artificial intelligence powerhouse. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are investing in data centres, computing infrastructure and AI development, positioning themselves as emerging technology hubs.
But the World Bank's latest economic update, published in October 2026, reveals an interesting regional divide: some of the countries where AI engineering skills have spread rapidly are not the ones attracting the largest investments.
Between 2016 and 2025, the share of LinkedIn members reporting AI engineering skills more than tripled in Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Tunisia.
Yet much of this talent is moving elsewhere.
According to the World Bank, GCC economies are net importers of AI engineering talent, while several middle-income economies are net exporters, losing specialists to the Gulf and advanced economies.
Source: Stanford University, AI Index Report 2026 (LinkedIn data, 2025)
This creates an emerging division of roles: wealthier countries are building the infrastructure, while neighbouring economies are helping supply the engineers needed to develop and operate it.
And the economic opportunity is substantial.
The World Bank estimates that AI could enhance productivity in 13–20% of jobs across the broader Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region. Meanwhile, fewer than 10% of jobs face near-term automation risk.
In other words, the region's immediate opportunity may be less about replacing workers and more about making existing workers productive enough to compete globally.
But infrastructure and talent are only part of the story.
Despite more than 500 million people speaking Arabic, the language accounts for just 0.7% of global web URLs, according to the Common Crawl data cited by the World Bank. This digital underrepresentation presents a challenge for developing AI systems that understand the region's languages, dialects and local context.
The contrast is striking. The region is investing heavily in the machines that power AI, developing the people who build it, yet still lacks much of the locally relevant digital content needed to make it work effectively.
For countries such as Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia, this presents both a risk and an opportunity. They could remain suppliers of skilled workers to wealthier economies, or develop businesses, datasets and applications that allow them to capture more of the value themselves.
The next question for MENA's AI economy is not simply who will build the biggest data centres. It is who will own the businesses, technology and knowledge that turn those investments into lasting economic value.
Written by MENACodex. Figures are cited to their sources.