What should every Omani watt build in return?

The phone in my hand was drawing about 1 watt when I read that Nvidia is reportedly in talks with OpenAI over a proposed data centre project in southern Ohio. Its planned power capacity was a number in the billions of watts, so large that I understood the words without understanding their scale.
In my hand was my phone, a 1-watt device; on its screen was a project with larger capacity than Oman's entire reported system peak. To make sense of it, I began counting watts. The phone was 1, an LED bulb 8, my laptop 30 and a kettle 2,000. One turbine at Dhofar Wind Farm can produce 3.8 million watts at full capacity, while Manah I and II together can produce 1 billion. The reported 2025 peaks across Oman's transmission networks added up to roughly 9 billion watts or 9 gigawatts, although they did not necessarily occur at the same moment. The Ohio project plans for 10 billion.
Somewhere between the phone and the final number, artificial intelligence stopped feeling weightless. Everything we call the cloud eventually comes back to earth, where it asks for electricity, transmission lines, land and, depending on how it is cooled, water.
Last month, a colleague from the German embassy mentioned that he had never experienced a blackout in Oman. I found myself reaching for my own memories of childhood outages, brief interruptions that were unremarkable at the time and have become rare enough to feel distant. Between his observation and my memory sit 20 years of work by people who studied demand, built ahead of it and made reliability feel ordinary. Peak load on the main transmission network rose by 225 per cent, while the network expanded way beyond 10,000 kilometres and reached 99.9999 per cent reliability.
Its invisibility is part of the achievement. Electricity became something most of us could use without having to wonder where it came from, how far it had travelled or what had been built to ensure it arrived.
Artificial intelligence changes that relationship because its appetite cannot remain invisible. Oman is already preparing for it through the Oman Digital Triangle, which imagines 3 interconnected hubs with gigawatt-scale capacity for AI data centres. In Shanghai this month, Oman also joined 28 other countries as a founding member of the new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, participating in both the physical and governing dimensions of AI. Oman enters that room with land, renewable resources, reliable electricity and global cable connections.
The opportunity is significant, although its value will depend on what remains in Oman after the electrons are consumed. A data centre can bring investment while leaving behind little more than an electricity bill if its equipment, expertise, ownership and research all sit elsewhere. Its national value should be measured by how effectively it converts Omani power into Omani capability.
Measured by capability, every project should pay for the generation and grid it requires, use cooling suited to a water-scarce country and match its electricity consumption with credible renewable supply, hour by hour. Its value should extend past the data centre through local procurement, specialist careers, research partnerships and computing access for Omani universities, start-ups and institutions. Energy, water, climate, digital and education policy meet at the same socket, while the benefits and trade-offs travel far beyond it.
The article soon disappeared beneath the next item on the 1-watt screen in my hand, but its 10-billion-watt number remained. Oman has spent 20 years making electricity feel effortless. Oman's next achievement will be to decide, before the machines arrive, what every Omani watt should build in return.