UAE likely to strike advanced Nvidia-chips deal with US during Trump visit

The Trump administration is weighing a deal that would allow the UAE to import more than a million advanced Nvidia chips, a quantity that far exceeds limits under Biden-era AI chip regulations, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.

The deal, which is still being negotiated and could change, would let the UAE import 500,000 of the most advanced chips on the market each year from now to 2027, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

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While one-fifth would be set aside for the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, the rest will go to US companies building data centres in the Gulf nation, according to the report.

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ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which may announce new data-centre capacity in the UAE as soon as this week, could be one of those companies, the report said.

The report comes on the heels of US President Donald Trump securing a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the US.

Trump plans to visit the UAE on Thursday. The New York Times on Monday also reported that the Trump administration is nearing a deal to allow UAE to buy large volumes of Nvidia's AI chips.

The Department of Commerce and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment, while Nvidia declined to comment.

According to the Bloomberg report, G42 could purchase computing capabilities equivalent to between 1 million and 1.5 million H100 chips over the lifetime of the deal. That is around four times more than it would have been allowed to buy under a Biden-era chip export control framework, known as AI diffusion, it said.

Trump's administration plans to rescind and modify this rule, which curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce had said last week.

US tech firms' deals

A number of US technology firms on Tuesday announced artificial intelligence deals in the Middle East as Trump secured $600 billion in commitments from Saudi Arabia to US companies.

Among the biggest deals, Nvidia said it will sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips in Saudi Arabia, with a first tranche of 18,000 of its newest "Blackwell" chips going to Humain, an AI startup just launched by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. Chip designer Advanced Micro Devices also announced a deal with Humain, saying it has formed a $10 billion collaboration.

Another company to announce a deal with Humain, was Qualcomm Inc, which said it signed a memo of understanding to develop and build a data centre central processor (CPU). The San Diego-based chip designer bought server CPU maker Nuvia in 2021 but has not yet released a product.

Trump began his Gulf tour on Tuesday, kicking it off with the signing of a strategic economic agreement with Saudi Arabia as the oil power rolled out the red carpet. Trump's Middle East visit aims to drum up trillions of dollars in investments.

The deals will flow both ways.

The White House said Saudi Arabian firm DataVolt will invest $20 billion in AI data centres and energy infrastructure in the United States. Alphabet's Google, DataVolt, Oracle Corp, Salesforce Inc, Advanced Micro Devices and Uber will invest $80 billion in cutting-edge transformative technologies in both countries, the White House said, without giving details.