The United States is teaming up with the United Arab Emirates to facilitate Abu Dhabi’s acquisition of advanced American semiconductors for AI initiatives, as stated by President Trump on Friday.
“Just yesterday, we struck a deal that paves the way for the UAE to purchase some of the most cutting-edge AI semiconductors from US companies. It’s a big move,” Trump mentioned during the final day of his four-day visit to the Middle East.
He claims the trip has resulted in agreements worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Details surrounding this new agreement remain unclear, but it might be a preliminary arrangement reported by Reuters, which would allow Abu Dhabi to import 500,000 NVIDIA H100 chips annually.
The White House has not responded to inquiries for comments yet.
This initiative could accelerate Abu Dhabi’s efforts to establish large data centers, which have been hindered by chip export restrictions related to national security.
The Trump administration is planning to ease some of the stringent restrictions that were put in place by the previous administration under Joe Biden.
However, there’s some worry that relaxing these limits might allow China greater access to advanced US semiconductors.
Since 2022, the US has prohibited the export of NVIDIA H100 chips to China, and those restrictions were tightened further earlier this year, complicating NVIDIA’s ability to ship H20 chips to the region.
On another note, the White House recently unveiled a contract with the UAE to develop a substantial data center in Abu Dhabi.
The Emirati tech firm G42, in collaboration with various US firms, is spearheading the project, which spans 10 square miles and has a capacity of 5 gigawatts.
While the White House did not specify any US companies involved, several tech CEOs accompanied Trump on his Middle Eastern tour, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
Cisco President Jeet Patel was also part of the delegation, along with Palantir’s Alex Karp and Amazon’s Andy Jassy.
