28/04/2026
As per BIS working paper, the US has ~700 AI firms. China has ~250. The rest of the world is watching.
The Bank for International Settlements just mapped global AI production across 32 economies and the concentration is striking.
Most economies — including the GCC — exist almost entirely at Layer 1.
Compute. Hardware. Semiconductors.
The value isn't there. The value is in Layers 4 and 5 — AI Models and AI Applications. That's where the US dominates. That's where the revenue is. That's where the jobs of the next decade live.
Three findings from the BIS paper that should matter to every GCC strategist:
🎯 Specialisation gap — Most economies cluster in hardware (Compute), with almost no presence in downstream AI application layers. That's where the economic value is being captured.
🏠 Home Bias in AI investment — Capital flows domestically, to Applications. If your economy isn't building AI applications for your own market, foreign capital — and foreign firms — will.
📈 VC drives density — Venture capital inflows are strongly correlated with AI firm concentration. The GCC's sovereign wealth funds are deploying billions in global AI. The question is: how much is coming back home?
The GCC is at a structural fork.
It can remain a compute-layer economy — supplying the hardware and data centres that power other countries' AI ecosystems.
Or it can build upstream. Applications. Models. Ecosystems designed for Arabic-language markets, Islamic finance, Gulf logistics, and government services.
That second path requires a different kind of intelligence — market, economic, and strategic.
If you're working on AI strategy, market entry, or economic policy in the GCC and want a sharper read on where the region sits in the global AI supply chain — let's talk.