Gulf AI deals accompany a presidential visit

President Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the UAE produced a cluster of AI infrastructure announcements. At the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh, NVIDIA and the Saudi state-backed firm Humain announced a partnership under which NVIDIA would supply an initial 18,000 GB300 Grace Blackwell systems, with Humain projecting purchases of several hundred thousand GPUs over five years to power roughly 500 megawatts of data centres. AMD separately committed to a partnership with Humain that included a $10 billion investment. In the UAE, reporting described plans for a large “Stargate” AI campus in Abu Dhabi with US technology partners including NVIDIA, Oracle and OpenAI, and an agreement allowing the UAE to import large volumes of advanced NVIDIA chips.

The announcements landed two days after the Trump administration rescinded the Biden administration’s AI Diffusion Rule, which had been due to take effect on 15 May and would have sorted most countries into tiers with escalating export restrictions on AI chips and model weights. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department called the rule “ill-conceived,” and officials said they would replace it with bilateral agreements negotiated country by country rather than a blanket tiering system — the approach reflected in the Gulf deals themselves.

Critics of the diffusion rule’s repeal, including some China hawks in Congress, warned that large accelerator shipments to Gulf states risked eventual diversion to China absent the rule’s safeguards; supporters argued the tiered system alienated allies and pushed them toward Chinese suppliers. The deals marked a significant expansion of AI compute capacity outside the US and China, tying Gulf sovereign wealth to American chip supply chains.