Donald Trump went on a wild trip to the Middle East with a bunch of billionaire tech bros, a fighter-jet escort, and business deals that are gonna shake up the global AI scene. The dude made a stop in Abu Dhabi and announced that some mystery US companies are teaming up with the United Arab Emirates to build the biggest AI datacenter cluster outside of America. Trump spilled the beans that these US companies are gonna help G42, an Emirati company, put together five gigawatts of AI computing capacity in the UAE.
Over in Saudi Arabia, they announced this AI investment firm called Humain, which is owned by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. This Saudi firm already has deals with big shots like Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and AWS—basically, US tech giants who know how to set up the crazy infrastructure needed for top-notch AI models. Trump was all pumped up in Riyadh, saying US and Saudi companies are gonna make deals worth a ton of money, focusing on infrastructure, tech, and defense.
The goal of these deals in the Middle East is to boost the status of American silicon and AI on the world stage, while also giving countries like Saudi Arabia a bigger role in the global AI race. Not really sure why this matters, but according to Paul Triolo from DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, getting access to those GPUs is a big deal for these countries. Saudi Arabia’s deal with Nvidia, for example, is gonna hook them up with 500 megawatts of capacity and a whole bunch of Nvidia’s best GPUs over the next five years. That’s a whole lotta power for making some serious AI moves.
### The Big Moves in the Middle East
These deals are all about pushing the Middle East to cozy up to the US, experts say. It’s not like they’re forcing Saudi Arabia and the UAE to pick sides, but it’s more like giving them an offer they can’t refuse. Trump’s hoping these deals will make the US dollar stronger by linking up the West with the Middle East financially. Plus, America might score some sweet energy and mineral resources out of the whole thing. The infrastructure being built by Saudi Arabia and UAE could benefit local companies as well as those in other regions like Africa. And since US AI models are top-notch compared to what’s coming out of the Middle East right now, this strategy could mean more AI around the world is proudly made in the USA.
### Model Making and Complications
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been hustling hard to make some advanced AI moves lately, pouring money into academic and industry labs to push the frontier of research. The UAE even snagged Eric Xing, a big-shot AI researcher, to lead the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. And Saudi Arabia got Jürgen Schmidhuber, a pioneer in AI, to head up their own AI initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. These countries have been making some progress, but having access to a boatload of AI computing power could speed things up big time. It’s gonna totally shake up the balance of compute in the world, especially with all those Nvidia chips heading to Saudi Arabia.
Tension between the US and China is making these deals a bit tricky, though. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have closer ties to China and use Huawei gear for their telecom infrastructure. That’s causing some headaches because Huawei is a big no-no for the US and its buddies. The UAE is trying to cut those ties by ditching Chinese equipment and teaming up with folks like Microsoft and OpenAI for their AI projects. But with the trade war between the US and China heating up, building AI hardware and infrastructure could end up costing a pretty penny.
