Who Is Leading AI? Ruth Porat, Vimal Kapur, Mike Sicilia, Tareq Amin — FII9

Right. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to what is the first day of FII 9. I'm sure you've had a terrific morning. Let's crack on with this afternoon session. If 2023 was the year AI captured the world's imagination and 2024 was the year that it became a fact of life, then 2025 is the year that it is being built out at a staggering scale. According to Gartner, worldwide spending on AI is expected to reach one and a half trillion by the end of this year, fueled by what is, as we are all aware, an unprecedented surge in infrastructure investment to sustain AI compute. Today I'm joined by the leaders shaping this AI race from every angle: from Google's investments in data and computing centers to its foundational and enterprise models, to Oracle's data and cloud muscle, to Humane's full homegrown full stack, and Honeywell's industrial heft at a moment when the sheer velocity of the industry is being met with global concerns over return on investment and when an AI bubble is also part of this conversation. It is well worth unpacking where we are at, where this race stands, and where it is headed. I couldn't be better served with my panelists today. Tarkan is the CEO of Humane. Ruth Porat is the president and CEO of Alphabet and Google. Mike is the CEO of Oracle. And Vimal Kapur is the chairman and CEO of Honeywell. Right. Quick fire round. Really only necessitates a yes or no, but feel free to spend a little longer if you fancy it, but no more than 30 seconds. There is a lot of talk of an AI bubble. Concerned we're underestimating demand? Got it?

No, no concerns. Long-term value creation is very big.

No concerns. There'll be winners and those who don't make it, like any technology revolution, but very excited.

Got it. All right. Let's drill down. Let's start with you, Tarkan, if I can. Humane is chartering a Saudi end-to-end full stack data centers, cloud models, applications, and we've seen announcements here which I want to get to a little later in this panel. I do think it's important for this audience to have you just briefly explain how this enormous and audacious project is going and what's the vision.

Vicki and everyone, nice to be here today. So Humane came together through the consolidation of public and private entities. When we envisioned what the company should do, of course maybe the easy thing I should have done was say let's just focus on a single vertical, but nothing easy in this journey. So we took an approach: we said Humane has to focus on the entire AI total value chain — a company that builds gigawatt capacity data centers, a company that has great partnerships for cloud, diversified chipset supply. We needed to really be the owners of our own foundation model and build true value realization on the AI application. It came together. It feels like I've been doing this for 10 years, but honestly it's been only about five since May 5th. We launched the company during the US president's visit to Saudi Arabia, and I would tell you, and you asked me yesterday, it's been the most exciting thing to see a company like Humane stand on its feet in a relatively short time, an opportunity to even do large impact projects. The stuff we're doing with Google is a first opportunity to truly build an AI hub that is not serving only the captive demand in the kingdom but to really achieve the objective of attracting global offtakers to take advantage of what the country has to offer. Everybody today in the world is chasing power, and Saudi Arabia has led the power through energy exports via oil. I am optimistic that Saudi Arabia could lead the world through energy exports via tokens. Coming back to that, standby.

Thank you for that. It does also feel to me as if you've been doing this job for a very long time. I'm not sure how much sleep you've had. That is maybe why it feels like 10 years rather than six months. Well done. I asked you yesterday whether this was overwhelming. You had a very good answer for me, and I'm going to come back to you on that as well. Ruth, let me bring you in here because I'm curious for your thoughts on Humane's proposition from Google's vantage point as an industry leader and hyperscaler, and for your broader thoughts on this moment of enormous global AI investment. How is Google working to ensure that this AI boom really translates to meaningful results?

Just before I come to you, Mike, you've been imbued in this industry now for some time. You work with people who've been deeply involved in both the internet and AI. When you talk to those who've been at the frontier over what is decades now, what is ultimately more powerful, the internet or AI?

Well, I am, as you know, privileged to work with someone who's described as the father of the internet. His name is Vince Cerf, and if you Google him, that is actually what you will find. And so I went to him because who better to answer that question, I think, than the father of the internet. And his answer was that AI is more profound for all of us. And the reason I thought was so beautiful and so consistent with FII and the spirit of it: he said AI leverages human creativity and human ingenuity, and there's no limit to that. And to me, that's just a beautiful place to be. And it's why when we talk about the upside from AI, it's the economic upside, but it's also the ability to better deliver for our people, the types of work we do around education that we're talking about together as well as around healthcare, around food security and other elements. And so that would be from the father of the internet.

You're still encouraging people to Google things, right?

Oh yes, they are.

Mike, Oracle is a leading partner here in this region in data and cloud infrastructure, both in the Kingdom of course and through Stargate UAE. You've also made headlines recently for your mega contracts to train OpenAI, Meta, and XAI models. What tangible impacts are you seeing from this AI push?

Well, we're actually seeing excellent impact already by combining these large language models or in some cases frontier models with existing applications. So as Ruth mentioned in healthcare, for example, we have now for about a year and a half had a cloud service called AI Service available that's embedded within our electronic medical records, electronic health records, clinical applications. We've had customers report that on an average shift for a doctor or a nurse or some provider, they've actually returned 100 minutes back to that doctor. That was time that they had to spend with the systems, time that they had to spend with obligatory documentation. And as everybody said, we're still in very early days. So I actually think that there's already dramatic impact with the AI that's set to deliver. We see the same thing in the banking industry. AI is a perfect complement to existing core banking systems to help automate financial crimes investigations, anti-money laundering investigations, all of which are very laborious, very manual processes. I think the next piece, and the even more exciting piece, is taking all the existing private data — healthcare data, banking data, all of which should and will remain private data — and marrying that together with these models, whether they're traditional large language models or frontier models, and coming up with either an inference or retrieval augmented generation strategy where you're taking the best of these very large, high-powered models and powering them with existing private data. Then I think you get into the healthcare industry, for example, which is one that everybody can always relate to: clinical assistance, clinical diagnosis, and clinical intervention at the point of care. Traditionally, that would take providers quite a lot of time to research on their own time. But how do you make intervention at the point of care? You need gigawatt-scale data centers. You need sovereign infrastructure. You need to get all the data in one place. And I think that all of that is very neatly coming together to have just major impact for businesses, for governments, and most importantly for humanity.

I think the sense I'm getting from all of you here is that this is still early days. Because this is such a pressing conversation now and there is so much money being invested and spent around investment, it feels like the speed is clouding the fact that we are at early days, and that's what this conversation is about. Before I move on — and I want to bring you in, Vimal — how do you respond, Mike, to concerns that these mega deals between your company, OpenAI, Nvidia, AMD are too circular, echoing the vendor financing of the dot-com era?

Yeah. So we're not involved in circular deals. I can only speak for my company on that. Look, I think there's real value here. I've seen the technology work firsthand at the edge in business applications, and at this point I can say, and I don't see this changing anytime soon, the demand far outpaces the supply.

Vimal, there's an untold story of the industrial sector, isn't there, and why it moves slower to transform. Can you just explain why and what Honeywell is doing to gain an edge in the competitive industrial AI space?

So the physical AI and industrial AI builds on all the work done by colleagues on this. If they don't do their work on infrastructure and core capability of AI, we won't even exist. But in the industrial world — think about a hospital, think about an airport, think about a refinery — what's different? First, the data is hard to get. The data friction is very high because the data is captured in very older systems; the protocols are unknown. So we need to solve for that. Second challenge is domain knowledge is very unique because each of them are very different. So just data alone is not a path to find the solution. You need to know what problem to solve for. And finally, our solutions have to be what we call deterministic: they exactly have to work, not almost, not 95% probability, it has to work 100%. We call it six nines. So when you take those three D's — data friction, domain knowledge, and determinism — the physical AI has to tweak the infrastructure which exists in larger language models to create the outcomes. But the good news is the outcomes are well known. Our customers' economic value creation point, as Ruth made, they are well defined. There are three problems to solve: asset life, operational excellence that you run it better, economic value creation, and the skill enhancement of the people. So if we can solve the three D's, if we can take care of data friction, if we have the right domain knowledge, and if we build deterministic outcome, we know what problem to solve for. And that's what excites us: the journey here is very exciting, the value creation is real, and I see our customers feeling urgency to drive that, whether customers in Saudi Arabia or rest of the world. So I really feel excited about the opportunity ahead.

I mean that sense of urgency is no better embodied than here in the Kingdom and the work that you are doing. Tarkan, Saudi — and you alluded to this in your first answer — Saudi is vying to grow from handling less than 1% of the world's AI workload to 6%. That's the goal. That would be trailing only the United States and China in terms of global leadership. You're looking to be number three. That's the vision. You argue that Humane's competitive edge is power. AI's insatiable demand for energy is of course abundant in this Kingdom. I just have to ask: is that enough to get you there?

Well, I think when you're building a business, there are many ingredients you start with. I had the opportunity, of course, to do amazing things in my previous roles in Japan, India, and the United States. There is one commonality you need regardless of saying I have power or not. The first and most critical thing is the foundation of people and organization. So my surprise — I mean I'm new to Saudi Arabia — so when I came here, my first thing that I thought I have to worry about is the talent and the depth of talent. Like any other leader on this group, I would tell you that I feel blessed every day I go to the office and I have researchers in my team that I learn from every day. I have executors that know how to build infrastructure. So one aspect is flawless execution and project management. I think I agree with Mike. First of all, I really tell you we are completely underestimating the demand. So the sense of urgency Humane has is around the build. 70% of my job, I feel like I'm a real estate developer. It's ensuring that we secure the land, power, connectivity. I've utterly made public that I truly believe Saudi Arabia has the potential and opportunity to be the third largest AI infrastructure provider outside of China and the United States. If you talk to Mike and even Ruth, they will tell you very clearly finding power is not a trivial thing. It's not like I want to build a data center and like magic now you have a gigawatt of capacity available. So what has happened in Humane now — and I mentioned to you when we were outside — this is a phenomenal opportunity in which public and private are partnering together under the direction of His Royal Highness, the Ministry of Energy. If you go and see a picture where a collection of 16 government entities and Humane are sitting together in one room trying to find and solve for where is available power that I could tap into that doesn't need substation buildout. I am motivated by time. Time is my worst enemy. And luckily we have solved for power, and we don't need to build additional capacity for the power at least up till 2030. And of course, post-2030, I'm very confident our large-scale campus will be ready with the capacity that we need. So whoever gets to this path of affordable, low-cost power, reliable, secure, and a structure for data governance — it's an ingredient that I feel could present to you as a compelling alternative for AI-native companies. And then lastly, we cannot really forget the importance of partnerships. It's really, really important. So we're not doing this alone. We have a lot of support that we started with, and I mentioned the early discussion. It's been almost a year ago that we talked to Ruth and the team about this crazy idea. It was crazy. I mean, when we started this, saying hey, what do you think about the idea of hosting non-Saudi workloads in the Kingdom? Just think about those early days of conversation and where we are today. But I'm optimistic. I mean I understand the job and the task in front of me. Yes, it comes with its stress, but I've done enough infrastructure buildout in my life. This is now an area where we have to flawlessly execute. The business offtake is done. It is done.

You launched Humane while Donald Trump was here back in May. There are still export controls to a degree on some of the most important assets that you need here in the Kingdom. You've diversified away from, for example, Nvidia chips; those aren't necessarily available to you in the abundance that you need. How do you describe that relationship with the US and the Trump administration? Very specifically, we know that the three pillars of AI were agreed — there were agreements to agree for a US-Saudi partnership around these significant AI pillars. What are you hoping to achieve?