First up, some of the deals that were announced today. From Bloomberg, May 15:
Trump Touts $200 Billion in UAE Deals in Wrapping Mideast Trip
US President Donald Trump has secured $200 billion in deals during a visit to the United Arab Emirates, according to the White House, including agreements involving artificial intelligence that will boost the Gulf nation’s technological ambitions.
“These deals will significantly expand investment in the United States and U.S. market access in the United Arab Emirates,” the White House said in a statement Thursday.
The announcements came during the third and final leg of the US president’s visit to the Middle East, where he highlighted investments earlier in the week of $600 billion from Saudi Arabia and more than $243 billion with Qatar. Trump made scoring business deals a centerpiece of his first planned overseas trip since returning to office.
The deals and initiatives with the UAE include:
- A $14.5 billion commitment from Etihad Airways to invest in 28 Boeing Co. 787 and 777X aircraft powered by GE Aerospace engines.
- ExxonMobil Corp., Occidental Petroleum Corp., and EOG Resources Inc. plan to partner with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to expand oil and natural gas production valued at $60 billion.
- A $4 billion primary aluminum smelter project that Emirates Global Aluminum will develop in Oklahoma.
- RTX Corp. is partnering with Emirates Global Aluminum and the UAE’s Tawazun Council on a gallium project to shore up US critical mineral supplies.
AI has been central to many of the agreements Trump has negotiated in the region. Gulf nations have been eager to secure greater access to cutting-edge chips in a bid to become hubs for the emerging technology and diversify their economies. Thursday’s announcements include:
- Plans for Qualcomm Inc. to help develop a new “global engineering center” in Abu Dhabi focused on AI and data centers.
- A new AI campus in the UAE that will be built by G42, the crown jewel of the country’s tech ambitions, and operated in partnership with several US companies. The US Commerce Department said the campus will include 5 gigawatts of capacity for AI data centers, providing a regional platform for large-scale providers of cloud or computing services.
- Amazon Web Services Inc., e& — formerly telecom company Etisalat — and the UAE Cybersecurity Council will partner on bolstering public cloud services in the country....
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And some background on the possible Nvidia deal, Bloomberg again, this time May 13:
US Mulls Letting UAE Buy Over a Million Leading Nvidia Chips
The Trump administration is weighing a deal that would allow the United Arab Emirates to import more than a million advanced Nvidia Corp. chips, people familiar with the matter said, a quantity that far exceeds limits under Biden-era AI chip regulations — and one that’s raised concerns that American hardware risks ending up in China’s hands.
The deal, which is still being negotiated and could change, would let the UAE import 500,000 of the most advanced chips on the market each year from now to 2027, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential conversations. One-fifth would be set aside for the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, while the remainder would go to US companies building data centers in the Gulf nation, according to the people.
One of those companies could be OpenAI, which may announce new data center capacity in the UAE as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter said. The people emphasized that discussions around that deal remain fluid.
Over the lifetime of the broader deal, G42 could purchase computing capabilities equivalent to between 1 million and 1.5 million H100 chips, Nvidia’s current best offering, the people said. That total is around four times more than G42 would have been allowed to buy under a Biden-era chip export control framework, known as AI diffusion, that Trump plans to scrap, according to the people. It’s on par with the number of chips needed to power a planned Meta Platforms Inc. data center in Louisiana that’s so large it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan.
All told, if the deal moves forward in its current form, it would mark a sea change in US policy toward AI development in the Middle East and specifically the United Arab Emirates, where US officials have long been wary of government officials’ and private companies’ ties to Beijing. The US has restricted advanced chip sales to China since 2022, an effort to prevent Beijing from making gains in AI that could benefit its military. One year later, the US expanded those rules to countries including the UAE over concerns that China may be able to access leading-edge chips via intermediaries....
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On the one hand with that many chips floating around that part of the world there is no way to keep a bunch of them from ending up in China. On the other hand, Nvidia's development cycle is focused on releasing new, more powerful chips every 12 -14 months meaning the current smoking hot H100 chips will have been superseded by two cycles at the end of the contract period.
