Countries across Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East are deliberately dividing their artificial-intelligence budgets between the United States and China rather than aligning with a single bloc. Saudi Arabia unveiled an Arabic-language model called Humain-m3 that runs on code released by Chinese startup MiniMax, while the kingdom simultaneously contracts U.S. firms such as Nvidia to supply the necessary compute hardware.
In August Brazil announced a roughly $444 million AI programme that is being split between Chinese and American technologies. A government statement, reported by Rest of World, quoted President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration: “The strategy is not to depend on a single company, technology or country.” Officials said the dual sourcing is intended to protect national data sovereignty.
Jesse Marks, a China-Middle East research scholar at the Australian National University, told Rest of World that building a full-stack AI capability has become prohibitively expensive for most governments. He noted that Saudi Arabia’s choice to use Chinese foundations for a sovereign Arabic model is “a natural decision” if those models outperform alternatives on relevant benchmarks, even though the move may have diplomatic repercussions with Washington.
The United States retains advantage in parts of the AI stack that are harder to replace, such as advanced semiconductors, networking gear and secure cloud services. Marks warned that countries unable to afford American hardware will increasingly turn to Chinese open-source offerings. He said, “Outside of the network of American partners who are trusted or can afford it, it’s Chinese AI. It’s open models.”
The split strategy is now spilling into diplomatic forums. Kazakhstan has joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica programme, which seeks to secure AI supply chains, while simultaneously signing up for China’s World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). Uzbekistan announced a similar dual engagement last month. Washington has signalled that it may issue warnings to nations that try to align with both U.S. and China-led AI initiatives.
In the Middle East, Huawei has submitted a bid to build Egyptian government data centres, competing with a proposal from Nvidia, according to a Bloomberg report cited by Rest of World. Malaysia is evaluating Huawei’s Ascend 910C accelerators for its sovereign AI programme, while the United States launched the ASEAN AI Spark initiative to fund public-sector AI projects in the region. Singapore, a founding member of Pax Silica, is weighing an invitation to join WAICO.