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. Saudi Arabia could use this capacity to develop new AI models. AWS announced in March it would build an AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, with a total investment of more than $5 billion. Humain and AMD have said that they will spend $10 billion in Saudi Arabia and US on AI infrastructure over the next five-year period. These countries have also established strong business relationships with China, who sells technology in the region. This puts them at the center of a growing rivalry between the US and China over AI. The directive sought to create tiers for nations to have different access to cutting-edge chips and limit the number of chips that Saudi Arabia and UAE could purchase. The rule was criticized by critics who said it could push some countries towards buying Chinese technology.
