Saudi-Chinese collaboration in artificial intelligence has stirred fears within the Gulf kingdom’s premier academic institution that the ties could jeopardize the university’s access to US-made chips needed to power the new technology.
Professor Jinchao Xu, an American-Chinese mathematician at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), has launched AceGPT, an Arabic-focused large language model, in collaboration with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ), and the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data [in CUHK-SZ].
…However, people at KAUST seeking to obtain these chips nonetheless believe that limiting Chinese co-operation is vital to secure delivery. “Many people involved have raised their concerns to leadership about the Chinese relationships jeopardising the supercomputer”, said one of the people aware of the matter. “They don’t want to upset the US government.”
…The AI initiative at KAUST, led by German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber, is developing a more powerful supercomputer, Shaheen III, that aims to deliver 20× more computing power than that of its existing system…The university said it had contracted Hewlett Packard Enterprise to deliver the Shaheen III system, for which the US firm chose Nvidia chips. KAUST was not buying the chips directly from Nvidia, the university added. KAUST has yet to receive the order.HPE said it was monitoring export controls and remained “committed to serving our customers around the world in line with US government guidelines”. KAUST also said it complied with US export control regulations and had a monitoring framework to meet the safeguarding regulations to be able to operate Shaheen III. “Physical and system software access to Shaheen III is limited to the KAUST Core Labs system administrator and Hewlett Packard Enterprise teams”, it said.