The Middle East Has Entered the AI Group Chat

Donald Trump’s jaunt to the Middle East featured an entourage of billionaire tech bros, a fighter-jet escort, and business deals designed to reshape the global landscape of artificial intelligence.

On the final stop of the tour in Abu Dhabi, the US president announced that unnamed US companies would partner with the United Arab Emirates to create the largest AI datacenter cluster outside of America.

Trump said that the US companies will help G42, an Emirati company, build five gigawatts of AI computing capacity in the UAE.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who leads the UAE’s Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council and is in charge of a $1.5 trillion fortune aimed at building AI capabilities, said the move will strengthen the UAE’s position “as a hub for cutting-edge research and sustainable development, delivering transformative 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 firm launched with blockbuster deals already inked with Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and AWS—US tech giants capable of building the infrastructure needed to train and power cutting-edge AI models.

Trump said in a speech in Riyadh that US and Saudi companies would do deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with a focus on infrastructure, tech, and defense.

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.

“It will help the Saudis and the UAE become bigger players in providing AI infrastructure,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, a geopolitical consulting group. “It’s a big deal to get access to these GPUs.”

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.

According to one estimate, this could translate to around 250,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips, which are four times better at training and 30 times better at inference (running models that have already been trained) than the next-best offering. This capacity could lead Saudi Arabia to create frontier AI models.

AWS and Humain said they would jointly invest $5 billion in infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. AWS said in March that it will build an AI infrastructure zone in the country, investing more than $5.3 billion. Humain and AMD said they would spend $10 billion on AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the US over the next five years.

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 toward more high-tech economies by building out cutting-edge tech infrastructure. The countries also, however, have significant business ties to China, which sells technology to the region, placing them at the nexus of a growing geopolitical rivalry 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 created tiers of nations with different access to cutting edge chips, and sought to limit how many chips Saudi Arabia and the UAE could buy. Critics of the rule suggested it might push some countries to buy Chinese technology instead.

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.”