The energy industry has spent the past 18 months revisiting security, with events such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, rerouting of tanker traffic, sustained pressure on LNG flows into Asia, and the March 2026 strikes on AWS infrastructure in the Gulf reinstating physical infrastructure and chokepoint exposure to the top of agendas. A second infrastructure question is now forming around compute, where decisions in the next 18 months will set pricing power for 15 years. Three pressures—cost and availability of firm power, control over model and chip capabilities, and regulatory standing—are shaping where hundreds of billions of dollars of AI capex will land. The Gulf is executing on the advantage of cheap firm power fastest. On 13 May 2025, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund launched HUMAIN, a full-stack AI subsidiary, with partnerships including AMD (a $10 billion, 500 MW compute deployment) and AWS (a $5 billion AI zone). The UAE's Stargate UAE project, anchored by G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA and SoftBank, targets a total campus capacity of 5 GW, with its first 200 MW operational block scheduled for Q3 2026.