Trump's Middle East tour brings trillion-dollar gifts from wealthy patrons, NVIDIA receives a big package
During his visit to the Middle East, Trump reached the largest commercial agreement ever between the two countries with Saudi Arabia, which includes an $80 billion investment in cutting-edge technology from companies such as Alphabet - C, DataVolt, and Oracle, as well as a $20 billion investment from DataVolt in AI data centers and energy infrastructure; at the same time, Saudi Arabia pledged to invest $600 billion in the United States to strengthen America's "energy security, defense industry, technological leadership, and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals."
Trump's Middle East visit boosts AI giants flocking to the region.
According to CCTV News, U.S. President Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates from the 13th to the 16th local time. According to media reports, during Trump's visit to the Middle East, the U.S. government paved the way for the development of AI in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
On Tuesday, according to a White House announcement, Trump announced during his visit to Saudi Arabia that Saudi Arabia has committed to investing $600 billion in the U.S., strengthening the strategic partnership between the two countries and promoting economic prosperity, marking the largest commercial agreement in the history of both nations. The first batch of agreements related to these investments will enhance the U.S.'s "energy security, defense industry, technological leadership, and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals."
The White House stated that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have reached the largest commercial agreement in history, which includes $80 billion in cutting-edge technology investments from companies such as Google, DataVolt, and Oracle, a $20 billion investment in AI data centers and energy infrastructure from DataVolt, a $4.8 billion procurement of Boeing aircraft, and nearly $142 billion in the largest arms sales agreement in history. The Saudi Crown Prince stated that Saudi Arabia will strive to increase its investment in the U.S. to $1 trillion.
Reports indicate that under the impetus of the U.S. government, American tech companies, including NVIDIA and AMD, are expected to invest billions of dollars in the region, making it easier for Saudi Arabia and the UAE to obtain advanced AI chips from NVIDIA and AMD, and promoting the establishment of data centers and AI infrastructure projects.
Trump Administration Overturns Biden's AI Chip Restrictions
To pave the way for the development of artificial intelligence, the U.S. officially revoked the so-called "AI diffusion rules" introduced by the Biden administration on Tuesday.
This measure set three different access levels for countries seeking AI chips, which had previously faced strong opposition from companies like NVIDIA and U.S. allies, as the rules restricted countries from purchasing chips.
According to media reports, Trump administration officials are now drafting their own approach, which is expected to shift towards negotiating individual agreements with various countries.
NVIDIA and AMD Bet on Saudi Arabia
Currently, chip giants like NVIDIA and AMD are working hard to expand their customer base for AI accelerator chips. This market is currently dominated by a few data center operators, including Microsoft and Amazon.
Attracting sovereign AI projects, which are state-supported initiatives aimed at building national AI capabilities, is an important strategy for NVIDIA and AMD to expand their customer base.
Humain, a new AI value chain subsidiary under Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, aims to establish Saudi Arabia as an international AI powerhouse. Humain has committed to building data centers with a total capacity of 1.9 gigawatts by 2030 and will develop a large language model in Arabic Wall Street Journal previously mentioned Nvidia will sell more than 18,000 of its latest artificial intelligence chips to Humain for its large data center project.
Humain is also collaborating with AMD, which stated that it will provide chips and software for data centers "extending from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States," with a project cost of $10 billion.
It is expected that in the next five years, the new factory will be powered by hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs, with a power generation capacity of up to 500 megawatts. The first deployment phase will include a supercomputer equipped with 18,000 Nvidia GB300 Grace Blackwell AI chips and Nvidia InfiniBand networking. This news drove Nvidia's stock price up more than 6% during trading on Tuesday, with a cumulative increase of over 14% in the past five days.
OpenAI Targets UAE: Stargate May Land in the Middle East
In addition, OpenAI's ambitious global version of "Stargate" may first land in the UAE.
Wall Street Journal previously mentioned that OpenAI is considering building a new data center in the UAE, and this deal has not yet been finalized, with an announcement possible as early as this week during President Trump's visit to the Middle East.
It is noteworthy that the Trump administration is considering reaching an agreement that would allow the UAE to import more than 500,000 of the most advanced chips on the market each year from now until 2027, a number far exceeding the AI chip regulatory restrictions passed during Biden's presidency.
According to media reports, among the chips that the agreement allows Nvidia to sell to the UAE, one-fifth will be supplied to Abu Dhabi's AI company G42, with the remainder allocated to U.S. companies building data centers in the UAE, with OpenAI possibly being one of them
