On the last stop of the trip in Abu Dhabi, the US President announced that unknown US companies would mate with the United Arab Emirates to create the largest AI server grouping outside of America.
Trump claimed that US businesses would support G42, an Emirati firm, in constructing five gigawatts of AI technology capacity in the UAE.
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is in charge of the UAE’s Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council, said the move will improve the UAE’s status as a “hub for cutting-edge analysis and sustainable development, delivering revolutionary benefits for humanity.”
A few days earlier, as Trump arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia announced Humain, an AI investment firm owned by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. The Saudi company entered the US tech giants with significant deals already signed with Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and AWS, which are capable of creating the infrastructure needed to train and power cutting-edge AI models.
Trump stated in a speech in Riyadh that US and Saudi companies would work on deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with an emphasis on defense, technology, and infrastructure.
The deals forged in the Middle East this week are meant to strengthen the global importance of American silicon and AI, but they will also help nations like Saudi Arabia play a more significant role in the global race to develop and distribute cutting edge technology.
According to Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, a geopolitical consulting firm,” It will help the Saudis and the UAE become bigger players in providing AI infrastructure.” ” It’s a big deal to have access to these GPUs,” said one user.
Saudi Arabia’s deal with Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI training hardware, will amount to 500 megawatts of capacity and involve” several hundred thousand of Nvidia‘s most advanced GPUs over the next five years”, the company said in a statement.
This could translate to roughly 250, 000 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips, which are 30 times better at inference ( running models that have already been trained ) than the next best offering. This capability might encourage Saudi Arabia to develop innovative AI models.
AWS and Humain said they would jointly invest$ 5 billion in infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. With a$ 5.3 billion investment, AWS announced in March that it would create an AI infrastructure zone in the nation. Over the next five years, Huawei and AMD announced they would spend$ 10 billion on AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the US.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other nations in the region have vast quantities of oil money, access to plenty of power, and a strong desire to shift towards more high-tech economies by building out cutting-edge tech infrastructure. The nations are also close to China, which sells technology to the region, which places them at the center of a growing geopolitical conflict over the future of AI.
Diffusion Rule
A few days before Trump’s visit to the Middle East, his administration reversed a major Biden-era ruling that would have limited the sale of cutting-edge chips globally. The directive established tiers of countries with different access to cutting-edge chips, and it sought to restrict the amount of chips Saudi Arabia and the UAE could purchase. Some opponents of the rule argued that it might encourage some nations to instead purchase Chinese technology.
In a statement announcing the change, the US Bureau of Industry and Security said the Biden rule “would have stifled American innovation and saddled companies with burdensome new regulatory requirements” and “undermined U. S. diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by downgrading them to second-tier status”.
Additionally, the statement issued advice to other countries to refrain from using Huawei AI chips and urge them to take steps to stop US chips from entering China. The consequences of not complying with the directive were not specified.
Trump’s deals are designed to nudge the region towards greater alignment with the US, experts say. Triolo continues,” This is not explicitly forcing Saudi Arabia and the UAE to choose sides.” It sort of translates to” we’re making you an offer you can’t refuse”
The deals could strengthen the US dollar by building financial ties between the West and the Middle East. Additionally, they might aid in ensuring America’s energy and mineral resources. The infrastructure constructed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE is likely to be useful for both local businesses and those in regions like Africa. And because US models are far better than those produced in the Middle East—at least for now—this strategy could help ensure that more of the AI used around the world is made in America.
The deals made this week are a step in a campaign to increase US techno-influence globally, especially in relation to China, according to Robert Tager, director of the University of Oxford’s Martin AI Governance Initiative.
On the one hand, there is a sense of a race against China, and the US wants to be fundamental to the global tech landscape, Tager says. ” I think they don’t know exactly how they want to square that circle]but ] the US doesn’t want a situation where DeepSeek is the basis for the AI ecosystem around the world”.
Modeling
In recent years, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made significant investments in academic and industry labs focused on cutting-edge AI.
In 2020, the UAE hired Eric Xing, a prominent AI researcher, to lead the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence ( MBZUAI ). A research lab for the UAE government has since released a number of advanced AI models known as Falcon in Arabic. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia appointed Jürgen Schmidhuber, a pioneer in contemporary AI, as the country’s first AI leader in 2021.
The AI research produced by these nations has been of modest quality compared to the advancements coming out of the US and China, Triolo says. However, having access to significant amounts of AI computing power might help the region advance. Tager claims that the number of Nvidia chips heading to Saudi Arabia” changes the balance of compute in the world.”
Georgia Adamson, a research associate with the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies ( CSIS), adds:” These aren’t your chips of yesterday, they are the next generation. It is incredibly intriguing in terms of the abilities they will obtain from this.
China Calling
Tension between the US and China make these deals complicated. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE use Huawei equipment for telecommunications infrastructure, which are closer to China than nations that are viewed as close US allies. The US and a number of allies have listed Huawei on the blacklist.
The UAE has sought to sever some ties to address US concerns, with G42 announcing in 2024 that it would remove Chinese equipment from its facilities. In April of that year, G42 and G42 also signed a contract allowing Microsoft to invest and construct infrastructure in the nation. The UAE is a significant supporter of OpenAI’s Stargate project, which aims to invest$ 500 billion to build AI infrastructure in the US.
According to Adamson of CSIS, there are two main risks for the US when it comes to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The first is that the deals could allow chips to be smuggled into China or provide Chinese firms with access to large, cutting-edge computer clusters. The second is that these nations might eventually compete technologically with the US. She mentions that there is a competition element here. ” We don’t want today’s allies to be tomorrow’s enemies”.
Oil-rich nations are currently a boon to smaller US players in the AI race. Saudi Arabia announced in February that it would invest$ 1.5 billion to build a data center in Dammam that Groq, a US company that produces chips for effective AI inference, runs. In March, G42 said it would fund the development of a large datacenter in the US featuring chips from Cerebras, another US company hoping to rival Nvidia.
According to a source who collaborates closely with various governments on AI, the significant deals signed this week” signal that Saudi Arabia is aiming to be a global AI player.” To prevent deteriorating those relationships, they requested anonymity. Saudi Arabia has embarked on ambitious efforts to digitalize its economy to help with AI training and deployment, as well as investing in talent. These commitments point to Saudi Arabia’s view of AI as a strategic sector to diversify its economy beyond oil, the source continues.
