Donald Trump’s Shaking The Middle East was characterized by aides of billionaires’ tech brothers. Fighter Jet Escortand business transactions designed to reconstruct the global landscape of artificial intelligence.
At the final stop of the tour in Abu Dhabi, the US president announced that an unknown US company will partner with the United Arab Emirates to create the largest non-US AI data center cluster.
Trump said US companies will help the emirate G42 build 5 gigawatt AI computing capabilities in the UAE.
“The move will provide transformative benefits for humans, “as a hub for cutting-edge research and sustainable development,” said Sheikh Tanoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who leads the American Council on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology in the United Arab Emirates and is responsible for a $1.5 trillion fortune aimed at building AI capabilities.”
A few days ago, when Trump arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia announced Humain, an AI investment company owned by the Kingdom’s public investment fund. The Saudi Arabian company has already launched its blockbuster deals, already inscribed on Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and AWS.
Trump said in a speech In Riyadh, US and Saudi Arabia companies will be making deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with a focus on infrastructure, technology and defense.
The counterfeited deal in the Middle East this week aims to strengthen the global importance of American silicon and AI, but will help countries like Saudi Arabia play a more important role in global races, developing and distributing cutting-edge technologies.
“It helps Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates become bigger players in providing AI infrastructure,” said Paul Triolo, partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, a geopolitical consulting group. “Accessing these GPUs is a big deal.”
Saudi Arabia’s contract with NVIDIA, which controls the AI ​​training hardware market, will reach 500 megawatts of capacity and include “hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs in the next five years,” the company said. statement.
According to One Quotewhich could translate to around 250,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips. This is 4x better in training and 30x better in reasoning than the next best product (running models already trained). This ability could lead Saudi Arabia to create frontier AI models.
AWS and Humain said they will jointly invest $5 billion in Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure. In March, AWS said it would build an AI infrastructure zone across the country and invest more than $5.3 billion. Humain and AMD said they will spend $10 billion on AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the US over the next five years.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries in the region have a strong desire to move towards a more technological economy by building vast amounts of oil funding, access to sufficient power and building cutting-edge technological infrastructure. However, the country also has important business ties with China, which sells technology to the region, placing them in the bonds of growing geopolitical competition for the future of AI.
Spreading rules
A few days before Trump visited the Middle East, his administration overturned a major Biden-era ruling that would limit cutting-edge chip sales worldwide. The directive attempted to create a tier of countries with different access to cutting-edge chips and limit the number of chips that Saudi Arabia and the UAE can purchase. Critics of the rules suggested that some countries might push for them to purchase Chinese technology instead.
in statement Announcement of the change, the U.S. Industrial and Security Administration said that Biden’s rules “restrained American innovation and addled companies with new, burdensome regulatory requirements,” and that “downgraded US diplomatic relations to two-stage status will undermine diplomatic relations with dozens of countries.”
