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.

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.”

The statement also issued guidance warning other nations to avoid using Huawei AI chips and calling on them to implement measures designed to prevent US chips from ending up in China. The directive did not specify the consequences of failing to comply.

Trump’s deals are designed to nudge the region towards greater alignment with the US, experts say. “This is not explicitly forcing Saudi Arabia and UAE to choose sides,” Triolo adds. “It is sort of saying ‘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. They could also help America secure energy and mineral resources. The infrastructure built by Saudi Arabia and UAE is likely to serve local companies as well as 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.

Robert Tager, director of the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative at the University of Oxford, says the deals made this week are part of an effort to strengthen US techno-influence globally—particularly as it relates to China.

“There is this framing of a race against China on the one hand, and a sense that the US would like to be fundamental to the tech stack around the world,” 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.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both made concerted efforts to build cutting-edge AI in recent years, investing significantly in academic and industry labs working on frontier research.

In 2020, the UAE hired Eric Xing, a prominent AI researcher, to lead the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. Since then, a UAE government research lab has released several advanced Arabic language AI models known as Falcon. In 2021, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology recruited Jürgen Schmidhuber, a pioneer in modern AI, to head up its own AI initiative.

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. But having access to substantial AI computing power could accelerate the region’s progress. “It changes the balance of compute in the world,” Tager says of the number of Nvidia chips headed to Saudi Arabia.

Georgia Adamson, a research associate with the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adds: “These aren’t your chips of yesterday, they are the next generation. It is incredibly interesting in terms of the capabilities they are going to get out of this.”

Tension between the US and China make these deals complicated. Saudi Arabia and the UAE both have closer ties to China than countries that are considered close US allies, and use Huawei equipment for telecommunications infrastructure. Huawei is blacklisted by the US and a number of allies.

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 also signed a deal for Microsoft to invest and build infrastructure in the country. The UAE is also a key backer of OpenAI’s Stargate project, which aims to invest $500 billion to build AI infrastructure in the US.

The development of AI hardware and infrastructure may be further complicated by the trade war between the US and China. High tariffs and restrictions on exports threatens to make such projects more expensive.

There are two main risks for the US when it comes to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, says Adamson. 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 countries may eventually become technological rivals with the US. “There is a competition element here,” she notes. “We don’t want today’s allies to be tomorrow’s enemies.”

For now, oil-rich nations are a boon to smaller US players in the AI race. In February, Saudi Arabia said it would invest $1.5 billion to expand a datacenter in Dammam operated by Groq, a US company that makes chips for efficient AI inference. 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.

The giant deals inked this week “signal that Saudi Arabia is aiming to be a global AI player,” says a source who works closely with several governments on AI. They asked to remain anonymous to avoid damaging those relationships. 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 suggest that Saudi Arabia views AI not just as a technological frontier but as a strategic sector to diversify its economy beyond oil,” the source adds.