Sourced records of Chinese AI deployments across the Global South and the Middle East

Pony.ai operates a commercial Robotaxi service in Doha with Qatar's national mobility operator Mowasalat (Karwa); rides are fare-charged through the Karwa app. The programme began with public-road testing in August 2025 and launched a commercial pilot with onboard safety operators in December 2025, covering Old Doha and West Bay (Corniche, National Museum of Qatar, Museum of Islamic Art, Old Doha Port) plus a Hamad International Airport connection. At the AEMOB Forum on 7-9 September 2026 Pony.ai ran Gen-7 Robotaxis with no onboard safety operator.

Media City Qatar and Huawei signed an MoU at Web Summit Qatar (24 Feb 2025) to build a 'smart media campus' featuring AI-powered access control, intelligent asset management, multi-cloud media platform integration and next-generation storage; no capacity/investment figures disclosed.

Huawei's first Middle East cloud region, launched in Riyadh on 4 Sep 2023 with three availability zones; hosts Pangu large models and the ModelArts AI-development platform. At LEAP 2025 Huawei pledged a further US$400M over five years for AI-ready infrastructure; serves 1,000+ customers and 300+ partners, and the Saudi government built an Arabic LLM on the platform.

Alibaba Cloud's Saudi JV, Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC), launched services on 6 Jun 2022 with two Riyadh data centres, of a planned 16 nationwide.

Tencent Cloud announced its first Middle East cloud region in Saudi Arabia at LEAP 2025 (10 Feb 2025): two availability zones and >US$150M pledged, with AI services including E-KYC, Palm AI, an AI Agent Development Platform and multilingual digital-human tech; region expected operational in 2025.

Lenovo and Alat (a PIF subsidiary) completed a US$2B zero-coupon convertible-bond investment (8 Jan 2025) and broke ground on a Riyadh manufacturing campus to make PCs and servers (including AI servers), with production expected in 2026; Lenovo is establishing its Middle East & Africa HQ in Riyadh.

ICS Arabia, Shanghai's Lumaotong Group (LMT) and China Mobile International agreed (Sep 2023) to build the 'Desert Dragon' data centres — 187 MW across Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and NEOM — explicitly to support cloud hosting, AI applications, cybersecurity and big data; ~US$1.9B over three years, Phase-1 65 MW Riyadh targeted for 2026.

The Saudi Company for AI (SCAI), wholly owned by PIF, invested SAR 776m (US$206.54m) to form the JV 'SenseTime MEA' in Riyadh — an R&D centre building computer-vision and deep-learning solutions for smart cities, healthcare and education, with technology transfer to the Kingdom.

King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) signed an MoU with SenseTime (29 Jun 2022) to pilot a scalable Smart City Platform — smart building/parking/office management and contactless access — across KAFD's 94-tower Riyadh district.

SenseTime (via its SenseTime MEA JV) reported winning a contract to provide facial-recognition services for the NEOM megacity project, alongside a Mawhiba education-AI enrichment partnership, as part of its Saudi investment-for-deals strategy.

SenseTime MEA and King Saud University signed a partnership (11 Nov 2025) to launch a joint AI Innovation Center in Riyadh; SenseTime MEA is building a GPU cluster to supply compute for teaching, research and live projects across health, energy, logistics, smart cities and environmental monitoring.

Prosperity7 Ventures, Saudi Aramco's VC arm, participated in a ~US$400M round for Zhipu AI (mid-2024), valuing the GLM-model maker at ~US$3B — reported as the largest single China AI-model financing to date and Prosperity7's first China generative-AI unicorn bet.

Dahua Technology Middle East formed a JV (announced Mar 2024) with Alat, a PIF-owned company, to build a Saudi manufacturing facility for AIoT products for smart cities and enterprises, starting with CCTV/project products; first rollout targeted end-2024.

Aramco-backed Prosperity7 Ventures led an investment bringing Insilico Medicine's Series D to US$95M (10 Aug 2022); Insilico uses generative AI for drug discovery.

Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures led a US$73M round in Spirit AI, a Chinese embodied-intelligence / humanoid-robot startup founded Feb 2024.

Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures made a follow-on investment (reported 'tens of millions of RMB') in Shanghai autonomous-driving-solutions provider Hyperview / Hongjing Drive (May 2023).

Prosperity7 Ventures (Aramco) was a named investor in D-Robotics' US$150M Series B2 (total Series B US$270M, Apr 2026); D-Robotics is a Horizon Robotics spinoff making robot-compute platforms/chips for embodied AI.

Saudi Arabia's NEOM Investment Fund invested US$100M in Pony.ai (25 Oct 2023) and formed a JV to develop, manufacture and deliver autonomous-driving services, advanced vehicles and smart infrastructure in NEOM and MENA, including an AV manufacturing/R&D facility.

At Arab Health 2025 (Feb 2025) United Imaging announced a multi-disciplinary collaboration with Saudi Arabia's Al Mana Group spanning CT, radiotherapy, molecular imaging and AI, delivered via its uAI platform (AI-assisted reconstruction/diagnosis).

stc Group and Huawei launched an AI-powered Autonomous Network Level-4 operations platform ('ICNMaster') on 17 Jun 2026 — with AI anomaly detection, closed-loop automation, a 'FaultSpirit' reasoning engine for alarm diagnosis and a 'NOCMate' knowledge assistant — moving stc to predictive network management.