In 2017, a small Baltic nation did something quietly radical. Estonia, ever the start-up state, the one that gave the world Skype, Bolt, and more unicorns per capita than anywhere else, opened an embassy not in a city but in a server rack in Luxembourg.
Officially, it was called a data embassy: a mirror of the Estonian state, legally sovereign even on foreign soil. The premise was beautifully simple: if Tallinn’s servers were ever destroyed, the country would still exist in the cloud. Governance, continuity, even citizenship could be restored from backup.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The genesis of this piece, and my first encounter with the concept, came from a podcast last week, when Jonathan Ross, creator of the TPU and now founder and CEO at Groq, the AI inference chipmaker now valued at nearly $7 billion after a recent $750 million raise, sat down with Harry Stebbings of 20VC.
Ross traced the past, present, and future of AI infrastructure, and one theme kept resurfacing: whoever controls compute will control AI. It’s far from contrarian; it’s become orthodoxy, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where “compute sovereignty” has evolved into a new soft-power doctrine. The forefathers of American Dynamism, like Marc Andreessen, are its loudest advocates in a U.S. context.
Ross paints a world where demand for inference compute outpaces supply, where speed becomes a competitive advantage, and where sovereigns scramble for the electricity and chips needed to train and deploy large language models.
But it was the mention of the term data embassy that really caught my attention.
Ross wasn’t describing the Estonian model, a government backup or hedge against catastrophe; he meant something else – sovereign zones for compute and data within foreign data centres.
And, he suggested, Saudi Arabia could become one of their most important hosts.
Because almost no one has written about this evolution, less a defensive continuity plan and more a projection strategy, it seemed worth exploring.
So, this article does just that: tracing Estonia’s precedent, Saudi Arabia’s compute triple advantage, its forthcoming draft law introducing data embassies, the rise of one of the world’s largest inference clusters in Dammam, and the implications of a potential “compute OPEC.”
Storing your crown jewels in a friend’s vault
In 2007, a wave of cyberattacks, widely attributed to Russian actors, crippled Estonian banks, newspapers, and government websites. For a country that had digitised almost every function of the state, it was an existential shock.
The response was radical but proportional: if a nation could be disrupted inside its own borders, why not back it up beyond them?
The remainder of this article is for paid subscribers.
📌 Why does FWDstart have a subscription model?
We want to build a sustainable, independent publication focused on quality over clicks.
A subscription model lets us invest in deeply researched reporting, deliver insider-level insights, and stay aligned with our readers. It means we work for you, not the algorithm.
MENA deserves a true, authoritative tech publication – and your support can help us build that.
