Former du CEO on the promise and peril of AI

When Osman Sultan talks about artificial intelligence, the UAE telecom pioneer — who predicted the transition of telcos into technology companies long before it became fashionable — speaks with both conviction and caution.

While the majority of his current ventures are AI-backed, the former chief of Egypt’s first mobile operator and founding CEO of du is quick to sound the alarm about its perilous edges.

“AI is here to change and transform everything around us radically,” he told AGBI. 

Yet Sultan warns the world not to overlook the “serious concerns” swirling around AI, from job displacement to the blurring of lines between real and fake, and the influence on public opinion.

The risks cannot be siloed by industry or nation. 

“The only way to circumnavigate the threats would be collaboration on a scale we have never seen before,” he said, a mantra he believes applies to telcos as much as to AI labs. 

Watch the video to find out about the model Sultan proposes for the survival of telcos.

Sultan has kept busy with some non-executive mandates, having left his executive life over six years ago. 

He is now the chairman of Smile, a telco group in Africa; vice-chairman of Wateen, a fibre company in Pakistan; board member of an agro-food group in Egypt; co-founder and investor in two AI ventures; and a backer of an AI wealth-management startup. He has also written two books to keep his “intellectual production” going. 

His enthusiasm for AI is tempered by the challenges, identifying the biggest bottleneck as neither models nor money: “It’s power… investment in energy needs to go in parallel to investments in AI,” he said.

AI servers and data centres are voracious consumers of electricity. The International Energy Agency estimates that global electricity consumption for data centres will double to around 945 terrawatt-hours by 2030. 

The consultancy Deloitte estimates that AI data centres’ power demand could grow more than 30-fold by 2035, threatening to outstrip the pace at which new generation and grid capacity can be built.

Regional ambitions are equally strong. Investors see the Gulf as an opportunity to build AI data centres in desert climates, tapping renewable energy and advanced cooling technologies to sustain large-scale computing.

Yet even as the region positions itself as a cloud and compute hub for West Asia and Africa, Sultan argues that regional energy grids must scale alongside AI ambitions. 

Chips are the other chokepoint, albeit not for this region, according to Sultan. While countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE have secured authorisations for chip imports, Sultan notes that “in other countries it will be a real challenge”.

That challenge is not theoretical. Around the globe, export controls and geopolitical friction are reshaping the semiconductor landscape. US lawmakers are pushing for stricter curbs on China’s access to advanced chipmaking tools in the name of national security, a move analysts say could reshape AI supply chains.

“It’s a pity that this thing that is so impactful for humanity enters a race for more power and profit,” Sultan added. “It needs to be a global collaborative effort on how it can benefit humanity.”