Follow the Money

Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism provides the theoretical backbone for this session: the idea that human experience has become raw material for prediction and profit, extracted without consent and processed by systems whose operations are deliberately opaque. This week we follow that logic into the Middle East, where the AI economy is booming. Saudi Arabia’s launch of HUMAIN as a national AI company, the UAE’s strategic chip acquisitions, and PwC’s projection of $320 billion in AI-driven economic impact by 2030 all point to a region that is not merely adopting AI but actively reshaping the global AI market. The question is whether these investments reproduce the extractive patterns of the oil economy or represent something genuinely new.

Who controls the data infrastructure being built across the Gulf? How does the concentration of AI capital in a handful of states and corporations affect the communities whose data fuels the system? And what does “following the money” reveal about AI that the technical literature obscures?