A swath of US technology firms announced deals in the Middle East as Donald Trump trumpeted $600bn in commitments from Saudi Arabia to American artificial intelligence companies during a tour of Gulf states.
Among the biggest deals was a set signed by Nvidia. The company 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, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth-fund-owned AI startup, Reuters reported. Cisco on Tuesday said it had signed a deal with G42, the AI firm based in the United Arab Emirates, to help the company develop that country’s AI sector.
Trump plans to visit the UAE on Thursday. The New York Times on Monday reported that his administration is nearing a deal to allow UAE to buy large volumes of Nvidia’s AI chips as well.
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The deals will flow both ways. The White House said the Saudi Arabian firm DataVolt will invest $20bn in AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the US. Alphabet’s Google, DataVolt, Oracle, Salesforce, Advanced Micro Devices and Uber will invest $80bn in transformative technologies in both countries, according to the White House, though no further details were available.
Cisco said it had reached an agreement with UAE’s G42 “to assess the potential” to work together on cybersecurity technologies that use US AI as well as AI data centre technologies.
Saudi Arabia, which is seeking to make its economy less dependent on oil revenue, aims to position itself as a hub for AI and a leading centre for AI activity outside the United States. The pivot is recent: on Monday, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the launch of Humain, which will develop and manage AI technologies in Saudi Arabia. The two companies said they would leverage Nvidia’s platforms to establish Saudi Arabia as a global leader in AI, GPU cloud computing and digital transformation.
Command over the world’s most advanced semiconductors, vital for cutting-edge AI, has put Trump in a powerful negotiating position as he tours the Middle East. The deals with Saudi Arabia for AI chips stand in stark contrast to the strict restrictions the US has imposed on trading the commodity with China. Nvidia in particular has been prohibited from selling its latest models to Chinese firms, though some have still been able to match American companies’ AI, most notably DeepSeek.
