Qatar's AI Market Could Pass $2 Billion by 2030, Strategy& Middle East Says

The forecast splits the market into four parts. Strategy& puts AI platforms at $700 million, AI products at $500 million, and AI professional services and AI infrastructure at $400 million each. The firm argues that Qatar's bigger opportunity lies beyond its home market, in building AI products, intellectual property and technology services it can sell across the Gulf. It points to sovereign AI, Arabic-language applications and tools built for energy, financial services, healthcare and logistics.

The report's most concrete warning is about capacity. Strategy& estimates that Qatar's colocation market will need about 120 megawatts of utilised IT power by 2030. As of July 2026, the data centre projects announced publicly fell about 20% short of that, the firm said. That gap matters for Gulf states trying to host AI workloads locally rather than send them to cloud regions abroad.

"Qatar does not need to own every layer of the AI value chain to compete," said Hani Zein, a partner at Strategy& Middle East. He said Qatar should build where it has a real advantage, especially in sovereign AI and in expertise in its priority industries.

Chady Smayra, another partner at the firm, said the economic value Qatar gets from AI "will increasingly be determined by what its technology companies can commercialize."

To get there, the report recommends closer work between government bodies, technology companies, researchers and infrastructure providers. It also says Qatar should favour AI products that can scale commercially, come with clear ownership of intellectual property and have room to expand across the region. Strategy& names Qatar's existing technology infrastructure and regional business networks, including those of the telecom group Ooredoo, as possible channels for taking locally built AI products into foreign markets.

Other estimates of Qatar's AI economy use different measures and arrive at different numbers. A 2023 Strategy& study put the potential economic gains from generative AI in Qatar at about $2.6 billion a year by 2030. That figure measured economic impact rather than market size.

The report comes out as Doha hosts MWC26 Doha from November 8 to 10, where operators including Ooredoo and Vodafone Qatar are presenting AI services.