The US and United Arab Emirates are partnering on a path to allow Abu Dhabi to purchase advanced American-made semiconductors for its artificial intelligence projects, President Donald Trump said on Friday.
“Yesterday the two countries also agreed to create a path for the UAE to buy some of the word’s most advanced AI semiconductors from American companies, it’s a very big contract,” Trump said on the last day of his four-day, headline-making trip to the Middle East.
Trump has claimed the trip resulted in deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The terms of this latest agreement with the UAE are unknown, but the “very big contract” Trump mentioned could be a preliminary agreement earlier reported by Reuters that would allow Abu Dhabi to import 500,000 Nvidia H100 chips each year.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
It would help speed up Abu Dhabi’s mission to create massive data centers, an effort that has been slowed by chip export curbs due to national security concerns.
The Trump administration is planning to roll back some of the strict restrictions put in place by predecessor Joe Biden, which limited exports even to US allies.
However, there are concerns that lifting these rules could make it easier for China to get a hold of advanced US semiconductors.
The US government has banned the export of Nvidia H100 chips to China since 2022.
It further restricted exports earlier this year with a rule change that makes it more difficult for Nvidia to send H20 chips to China – semiconductors that were specifically designed to pass those 2022 regulations.
Meanwhile, the White House on Thursday announced a deal with the UAE to build a massive data center in Abu Dhabi, slated to be the largest such facility outside of the US.
Emirati technology firm G42 will lead the project, partnering with several US companies on the campus, according to the Commerce Department. The data center will cover 10 square miles with a 5-gigawatt capacity.
The White House did not mention specific US firms, though several US tech CEOs joined Trump on his lavish Middle East trip, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
Cisco President Jeetu Patel also accompanied the president on the trip, along with Palantir’s Alex Karp and Amazon’s Andy Jassy.
