Qatari telecoms provider Ooredoo told CNBC Wednesday that its new tie-up with Nvidia is compliant of all U.S. regulations and will still allow it to have access to the latest technology.

Ooredoo earlier this week signed a partnership with Nvidia, marking the chipmaker’s first large-scale entry into the Middle East market. The companies did not disclose the value of the deal.

The deal will see thousands of Nvidia’s GPUs (graphics processing units) deployed in 26 data centers across Qatar and five other countries: Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Tunisia and the Maldives. These chips will help the data centers process massive amounts of information, which will feed AI chatbots and other tools, essential components of a country’s AI infrastructure.

The tie-up comes after the United States last year restricted the sale of certain advanced chips to some Middle Eastern nations, over fears the technology could be intercepted by China.

Washington does allow the export of some Nvidia chips to the region, and Nvidia, AMD and Intel have all indicated plans to create less powerful chips for export to the Chinese market. The restrictions focus on A100 and H100 chips, not GPUs (another type of semiconductor) which are central to this deal.

Ooredoo told CNBC that the deal is compliant of all U.S. regulations. Under the partnership, no new licenses for different chips have been created.

“As a telecom operator, dealing with very stringent regulation is business as usual. We are used to dealing with regulators and government authorities, whether they’re local or international,” Ooredoo’s CEO told CNBC.

“We are working very closely with the different regulators and with Nvidia to see all the required approvals and to provide all the guarantees required,” he added.

A tug of war between China and the United States has played out in the race to obtain and protect the latest artificial intelligence technology. The United Arab Emirates’ top AI group G42 vowed to phase out Chinese hardware to appease Washington, later seeing through a deal with Microsoft worth $1.5 billion.

Gulf states are leveraging their vast energy wealth to try to become pioneers in artificial intelligence, investing in developing the technology and importing massive quantities of chips used in AI data centers.

According to Ooredoo’s CEO, the chips are latest generation GPUs, catered specially for artificial intelligence and “will be able to deliver extreme machine learning and model utilization of these AI models and generative AI.”

They will be used in citizen services for governments, and to enhance productivity and efficiency for general corporations and research and development.

The cloud partnership between Ooredoo and Nvidia aims to position the chipmaker as the central source for AI technology in the region, and according to Ooredoo will drive innovation, development and create jobs. The countries will get access to Nvidia’s latest full-stack AI platform, catering to both Ooredoo and non-Ooredoo customers through independent data centers.

Ooredoo also committed to investing $1 billion to boost its regional data center capacity even before announcing its partnership with Nvidia. Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, Ooredoo’s CEO, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy that he expects that investment to be returned in the years to come.

“The demand we’re seeing just from the cloud and now adding that layer of AI to it is already outstripping our most optimistic plan, so we will probably exceed that investment in the next three to five years.”

Qatar Investment Authority-backed Ooredoo, which is listed in both Qatar and Abu Dhabi, plans to develop a platform driven by AI and powered by Nvidia in the hope of meeting market demand.

Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company last week, overtaking Microsoft. The chipmaker rebounded in Tuesday trade, reversing a three-day losing streak which wiped over $550 billion from its market value.

Shopee and its courier service Shopee Express agreed to adjust its current practices after admitting to breaching a competition rule in Indonesia, the country’s watchdog said on Wednesday.

Shopee is the e-commerce arm of Southeast Asian tech giant Sea Limited.

“Shopee and Shopee Express admitted that they had violated Law no. 5 of 1999, regarding delivery (courier) services on the Shopee platform by agreeing to various behavioral change points determined by the KPPU Council in the hearing yesterday,” Indonesia Competition Commission Komisi Pengawas Persaingan Usaha said in a Google-translated statement.

KPPU said Shopee proposed adjustments to its current practices on June 20 which were approved by the commission council.

“Shopee Indonesia attended a meeting with KPPU on 25 June to discuss points of the integrity pact that was shared by KPPU last week. On 20 June, Shopee proposed changes to our user interface to enhance our services and demonstrate our compliance in providing the best services to our users, in accordance with the feedback provided and approved by the KPPU,” Radynal Nataprawira, head of public affairs at Shopee Indonesia, told CNBC in emailed comments.

“Shopee is always committed to complying with all applicable regulations and laws in the Republic of Indonesia in conducting our business operations,” said Nataprawira.

Last month, KPPU revealed its preliminary investigation found that Shopee allegedly prioritized Shopee Express in every package delivery to consumers.

The watchdog also accused Shopee of “discriminatory behavior,” saying Shopee Express and another delivery service J&T Express were “automatically activated en masse on the seller dashboard” while other companies that also have good service performance did not get selected automatically.

KPPU investigators also named an employee who held director positions in both Shopee Indonesia and Shopee Express, saying this “dual position” has the ability to influence competition and control the behavior of both companies.

KPPU is also probing Shopee rival Lazada, the Southeast Asian e-commerce arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, saying it has found indications of similar violations.

“If it is later proven to have violated, Lazada can be subject to a fine of a maximum of 50% of the net profit or 10% of the total sales it earned in the relevant market during the period of the violation,” KPPU said in a statement last month.

AMSTERDAM — Europe is at risk of falling behind the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence as it focuses on regulating the technology, according to Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands.

“Our ambition seems to be limited to being good regulators,” Constantijn told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.

Prince Constantijn is the third and youngest son of former Dutch Queen Beatrix and the younger brother of reigning Dutch King Willem-Alexander.

He is special envoy of the Dutch startup accelerator Techleap, where he works to help local startups grow fast internationally by improving their access to capital, market, talent, and technologies.

“We’ve seen this in the data space [with GDPR], we’ve seen this now in the platform space, and now with the AI space,” Constantijn added.

European Union regulators have taken a tough approach to artificial intelligence, with formal regulations limiting how developers and companies can apply the technology in certain scenarios.

The bloc gave final approval to the EU AI Act, a ground-breaking AI law, last month.

Officials are concerned by how quickly the technology is advancing and risks it poses around jobs displacement, privacy, and algorithmic bias.

The law takes a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, meaning that different applications of the tech are treated differently depending on their risk level.

For generative AI applications, the EU AI Act sets out clear transparency requirements and copyright rules.

All generative AI systems would have to make it possible to prevent illegal output, to disclose if content is produced by AI and to publish summaries of the copyrighted data used for training purposes.

But the EU’s Ai Act requires even stricter scrutiny for high-impact, general-purpose AI models that could pose “systemic risk,” such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 — including thorough evaluations and compulsory reporting of any “serious incidents.”

Prince Constantijn said he’s “really concerned” that the Europe’s focus has been more on regulating AI than trying to become a leader innovating in the space.

“It’s good to have guardrails. We want to bring clarity to the market, predictability and all that,” he told CNBC earlier this month on the sidelines of Money 20/20. “But it’s very hard to do that in such a fast-moving space.”

“There are big risks in getting it wrong, and like we’ve seen in genetically modified organisms, it hasn’t stopped the development. It just stopped Europe developing it, and now we are consumers of the product, rather than producers able to influence the market as it develops.”

Between 1994 and 2004, the EU had imposed an effective moratorium on new approvals of genetically modified crops over perceived health risks associated with them.

The bloc subsequently developed strict rules for GMOs, citing a need to protect citizens’ health and the environment. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences says that genetically modified crops are safe for both human consumption and the environment.

Constantijn added that Europe is making it “quite hard” for itself to innovate in AI due to “big restrictions on data,” particularly when it comes to sectors like health and medical science.

In addition, the U.S. market is “a much bigger and unified market” with more free-flowing capital, Constantijn said. On these points he added, “Europe scores quite poorly.”

“Where we score well is, I think, on talent,” he said. “We score well on technology itself.”

Plus, when it comes to developing applications that use AI, “Europe is definitely going to be competitive,” Constantijn noted. He nevertheless added that “the underlying data infrastructure and IT infrastructure is something we’ll keep depending on large platforms to provide.”