Are we incapable of invention, or merely resigned to the comfort of dependency?

A few days ago, I read news about Saudi Arabia’s purchase of artificial intelligence chips from the American company that leads this sensitive field, NVIDIA, bearing in mind that NVIDIA’s total market capitalization is approximately $4.89 trillion.
This transaction carries several implications, foremost among them the fragility of Saudi scientific and technological dependency on an American company. It raises a fundamental question: why does a country like Saudi Arabia—wealthy and endowed with major sovereign resources—not invest its capital in manufacturing AI chips instead of merely purchasing them from the United States?

Manufacturing requires ownership of production technology, and the deeper question is: what prevents the acquisition of this technology? Resorting to the easiest path—buying NVIDIA chips—seems difficult to justify, especially when we know that the sale process is subject, first, to the approval of the U.S. administration, and that these chips, second, embody the cognitive values of their designer and innovator. They fall within the framework of the United States’ high-technology strategy, ensuring it near-dominance over the rapidly growing AI market and representing one of the most important keys to cognitive sovereignty for a country like the United States.

By contrast, China has succeeded, through its companies, in developing a semiconductor industry to confront the American ban on the sale of such highly precise technology. How, then, can we explain China’s drive to secure technological and cognitive independence from the United States, while wealthy Arab countries remain in a position of dependency, content with purchasing the final product? It is as if cognitive independence were a challenge that exceeds the capacities of our most brilliant minds.