President Donald Trump announced a deal Friday clearing the United Arab Emirates to buy top-tier American artificial intelligence semiconductors, pulling the Gulf ally into the U.S.’s fast-growing chip ecosystem.
The agreement — finalized in Abu Dhabi, the last stop of Trump’s three-nation Middle East tour — caps a week of AI-heavy announcements, from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, that could control where the world’s most valuable computing power is built and who has access to it.
“Yesterday the two countries also agreed to create a path for the UAE to buy some of the world’s most advanced AI semiconductors from American companies, a very big contract,” Trump told business leaders at the Qasr Al-Watan palace. “This will generate billions and billions of dollars in business and accelerate the UAE’s plans to become a really major player in artificial intelligence.”
“In the UAE, American companies will operate the data centers and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a press release, stressing “strong security guarantees” to prevent any diversion of American-origin technology.
“Thankful for a great week in the Gulf with President Trump,” Lutnick later posted on X. “We secured over $3 trillion in new investments and announced our first AI acceleration partnership. This is just the beginning.”
Thankful for a great week in the Gulf with President Trump. We secured over $3 trillion in new investments and announced our first AI acceleration partnership. This is just the beginning.
— Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) May 16, 2025
The Emirati deal is just one in a series of Gulf negotiations. In Riyadh on Tuesday, Saudi-backed startup Humain ordered 18,000 Nvidia chips for a data center and lined up an AMD partnership, a combined $10 billion arrangement; Amazon Web Services pledged another $5 billion for an “AI zone” that will train Saudi government models.
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