Donald Trump’s harassment To the Middle East, there are entourages of the billionaire Tech Bros (Fighter Escorts) and commercial deals aimed at reshaping the global AI landscape.
At the last stop of the Abu Dhabi tour, the U.S. president announced that U.S. companies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, will work with the United Arab Emirates to build the largest cluster of AI data centers outside the United States.
Trump said U.S. companies will help UAE company G42 build five GW of AI computing power in the UAE.
Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who leads the UAE’s AI and Advanced Technology Committee, is responsible for the $1.5 trillion wealth aimed at building AI capabilities, said the move will strengthen the UAE’s status “as a state-of-the-art research and a hub for sustainable and sustainable development, providing transformative benefits to humanity.”
When Trump arrived in Riyadh a few days ago, Saudi Arabia announced Humain, an AI investment company owned by the Oregon Public Investment Fund. The Saudi company was founded with a blockbuster deal that has been signed with NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm and AWS, and the US tech giant is able to build the infrastructure needed for training and cutting-edge AI models of Power.
In a speech in Riyadh, Trump said that U.S. and Saudi companies will do multibillion-dollar deals with a focus on infrastructure, technology and defense.
The deals set up in the Middle East this week are designed to enhance the global importance of U.S. silicon and AI, but they will also help countries like Saudi Arabia play a more important role in the global competition to develop and distribute cutting-edge technologies.
“This will help Saudi Arabia and the UAE become larger players,” said Paul Triolo, partner at the geopolitical consulting group DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. “It’s a big deal to access these GPUs.”
Saudi Arabia’s deal with NVIDIA, which is dominated by the AI training hardware market, will reach 500 MW of capacity and involve “NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs in the next five years”, the company said in a statement.
According to one estimate, this could translate into 250,000 of NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art chips, which are much four times better in training, and reasoning (the already trained model) is 30 times more like the next best product. This capability could lead Saudi Arabia to create Frontier AI models.
AWS and Humain said they will jointly invest $5 billion in Saudi Arabia. AWS said in March that it would build an AI infrastructure zone in the country with an investment of more than $5.3 billion. Humain and AMD said they will spend $10 billion on AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the United States over the next five years.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other countries in the region have a lot of oil funding, gain a lot of power, and a strong desire to transfer more high-tech economies by building cutting-edge technological infrastructure. However, these countries also have huge business relationships with China, which sells technology to the region, putting them in a growing link in the future of geopolitical competition in AI.
Diffusion rules
A few days after Trump’s visit to the Middle East, his administration reversed a major Biden-era ruling that would limit the sale of cutting-edge chips around the world. The directive creates a level of countries that can use cutting-edge chips differently and attempts to limit the amount of chips that Saudi Arabia and the UAE can buy. Critics of the rule suggest that this could prompt certain countries to buy Chinese technology.
In a statement announcing the change, the U.S. Industry and Security Agency said that the Biden rules “will kill U.S. innovation and weaken U.S. innovation in a burden-protected new regulatory requirements and “destroy U.S. diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by degrading them to second-tier status. ”
