The Trusted Compute Initiative: Advancing Innovation and Collaboration Through C-SIPA

This project was generously funded by the US State Department

Project Description: For much of the past decade, leadership in AI was understood as a contest over models and talent. However, this contest has moved downstream to the infrastructure layer, where access to compute increasingly limits the ability to train AI at scale. Today, AI capability rests on a physical foundation — the datacenters, advanced semiconductors, high-bandwidth networking, and cloud platforms that train and run modern systems. Control over that foundation has become a primary axis of strategic competition. Whoever builds, secures, and governs this layer shapes who can develop and deploy AI, on what terms, and with what dependencies.

The Gulf region has been actively building critical AI infrastructure. U.S. cloud and compute firms have established and expanded infrastructure across the region, and Bahrain — an early adopter, with a government that was among the first in the Middle East to migrate to the commercial cloud — is positioning itself as a digital and AI hub aligned with national diversification goals. This rapid buildout creates an opportunity to pair the region's infrastructure investment with systematic analysis of the broader AI supply chain that underpins it: the provenance and trustworthiness of hardware, the security of networking and orchestration layers, the concentration of critical dependencies, and the resilience of these systems against coercion or compromise by strategic competitors. By examining these dimensions together, C-SIPA partners can ensure the region's AI infrastructure is built not only for speed and scale, but for long-term resilience and trust.

Over the next 18 months, this project will establish an enduring U.S.–Bahrain–UK research collaboration on securing the AI compute supply chain, producing a joint assessment that directly informs the regional infrastructure strategy and builds lasting capacity between U.S. industry and research institutions across the C-SIPA partner countries.