The Middle East AI Revolution Under PIF's Strategic Layout: How Lenovo (00992) Is Using Momentum to Become an Invisible Winner

In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in May 2025, an AI revolution driven by petroleum dollars is disrupting the power pattern of the global technology industry.

Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun and AMD head Su Zifeng appeared at the Saudi-US Investment Forum. The former signed a big desert computing power order with 18,000 GB300 chips, while the latter proposed a $10 billion transatlantic AI corridor plan, triggering a group frenzy of US AI concept stocks.

However, behind this feast, the real invisible trader is surfacing — the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF's “technological sovereignty” network woven with 940 billion US dollars of assets has disassembled the global AI industry chain into a three-stage battlefield of “chip development - hardware manufacturing - scenario implementation.” Meanwhile, the Chinese tech giant Lenovo is becoming the biggest variable and beneficiary of this geopolitical game, with its card slot manufacturing side 1 year ahead of schedule.

Saudi AI strategic trader PIF

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has slowly become a major consumer of AI chips. Because it has always sought to transform petroleum resources into AI advantages and promote economic transformation, it is one of the Middle Eastern countries with the most ambitious AI aspects.

In 2020, Saudi Arabia formulated the National Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NSDAI). The goal of the plan is to enter the top 15 in the global AI field by 2030. Saudi Arabia also plans to rely on 100 billion dollar investment projects such as “Project Transcendence” to build a technology center that can rival the UAE and attract global resources. Over the next few years, Saudi Arabia frequently hosted large-scale international events such as the Global AI Summit and the “LEAP” technology exhibition, drawing the attention of global political and business leaders and industry experts to the development of the Saudi AI industry.

According to market analysts, in the eyes of the US government and US technology companies, Middle Eastern countries with strong financial resources are essential places for the US to expand the AI ecosystem and maintain a leading position. Of course, in China's eyes, the Middle East market is just as important. According to Statista and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Middle East AI market will reach approximately US$34.18 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 29.55%.

It is easy to use petroleum revenue to buy computing power infrastructure, but it is difficult to build an autonomous and controllable AI industry chain. To this end, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF, which is behind this international trading strategy, forms a full-dimensional layout of the AI industry chain through holding two major platforms: Humain (technology research and development) and Alat (manufacturing implementation). Humain undertakes the task of developing a large Arabic model and building a global computing power network, while Alat is responsible for the localization of hardware manufacturing. This division of labor model requires that international technology must be deeply tied to local production capacity, and Lenovo is a key player in this process.

The Zhitong Finance App learned that in May 2024, Lenovo (00992) reached a strategic cooperation of 2 billion US dollars with Alat to build a manufacturing base with an annual output of millions of PCs and servers in Saudi Arabia (only 15 minutes by car from Riyadh International Airport) and establish headquarters in the Middle East and Africa. This layout is a full year earlier than the signing of orders from Nvidia and AMD, making Lenovo the only hardware supplier in the PIF industry chain to lock in production capacity ahead of schedule. According to the agreement, Lenovo's Saudi plant will be put into operation in 2026, which coincides with Humain's planned delivery schedule for the first batch of data centers (early 2026).

Lenovo may eat up trillion in infrastructure dividends

When Lenovo signed a $2 billion strategic agreement with Alat in May 2024, outsiders only viewed it as an ordinary transfer of production capacity. However, in combination with the recently revealed details of Saudi Arabia's AI strategy, Lenovo's deal will definitely become an important part of Saudi Arabia's AI strategy, and it has a strong competitive advantage.

The first is the advantage of localized hardware delivery. Saudi policy stipulates that government projects must purchase locally manufactured hardware. After Lenovo's Riyadh plant is put into operation in 2026, it will become the only enterprise in the Middle East with large-scale server production capacity, directly undertaking the 1.9 gigawatt data center requirements planned by Humain (equivalent to 1.5 times the AWS global availability zone), which will generate procurement requirements for millions of servers. Lenovo's local factory not only reduces logistics costs, but also avoids geopolitical risks.

In addition, the 18,000 GB300 chips delivered by Nvidia need to be integrated into the server to exert their value, and AMD's Zen4 architecture also requires hardware adaptation. And Lenovo is both a global partner of Nvidia and AMD, and a joint venture of Alat. This kind of “chip-hardware” collaboration is particularly critical in Saudi Arabia — according to the latest US export policy, although channels for obtaining advanced chips in the Middle East have been relaxed, hardware implementation still needs to be completed through trusted partners. As the holder of the “Made in Saudi Arabia” label, Lenovo can accept server orders for these projects.

PIF collaborates with multiple companies through Humain, and Lenovo can penetrate the wider ecosystem through the Alat platform. For example, when developing AI data center CPUs, Lenovo can use manufacturing experience to participate in hardware design; large Arabic model projects also require local computing power support, which provides an application scenario for Lenovo servers.

Therefore, Lenovo is likely to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this AI strategy.

The AI industry chain restructured by PIF through capital power is essentially a double battle between “technological sovereignty” and “manufacturing sovereignty.” The “local delivery of global resources” model demonstrated by Lenovo in this process provides a new paradigm for Chinese technology companies to go overseas — using sovereign funds as a fulcrum to embed manufacturing capacity in the host country's strategic industry, and ultimately achieve a transition from supplier to ecological leader.

As Saudi AI infrastructure enters an explosion period (2026-2030), Lenovo's invisible advantage may be transformed into 10 billion dollar revenue growth: in the short term, the factory will be put into operation in 2026 to accept Humain's first batch of hardware orders; in the long run, the IT service market in the Middle East and Africa will reach 38 billion US dollars in 2027, and Lenovo can seize share with priority through localized layout.