Artificial Intelligence Gulf has a strong hand in Trump’s $500bn AI project By Valentina Pasquali January 22, 2025, 11:12 AM Reuters/Carlos Barria SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman listen to Donald Trump talking about the Stargate AI project at the White House AI facilities to be built across US UAE’s MGX is investment partner OpenAI secures new Gulf funding Two of the three tech giants that will spend billions of dollars building US artificial intelligence infrastructure in a partnership announced by President Donald Trump have been the recipients of significant Gulf investment. Japan’s SoftBank and US companies OpenAI and Oracle have committed $500 billion over four years to Stargate, an entity tasked with building “colossal” AI facilities across the country and creating 100,000 American jobs “almost immediately”, Trump said on Tuesday. A fourth company, UAE technology vehicle MGX, will serve as an investment partner to the joint venture. “China is a competitor, and others are competitors. We want it to be in this country,” the president said. “I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. “They have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily, at their own plants if they want.” An immediate $100 billion is going to develop a data centre in Texas, the first 10 buildings of which are already under construction, according to Oracle’s chairman Larry Ellison. Ellison appeared with Trump for the announcement, along with SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. SoftBank has a long and complicated relationship with some of the biggest investors in the GCC. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala were early backers in Son’s startup-focused venture, but there have been few if any returns from those bets and the funds have more recently cut their exposure. OpenAI, on the other hand, has been on a fundraising streak in the Arabian Gulf. It recently secured fresh investments from MGX – whose founding partners are Mubadala and G42 – and from the Saudi IT company Al Moammar Information Systems. Son cited MGX as an investment partner to the Stargate joint venture and Nvidia as a technology partner. He also said Microsoft was supporting the endeavour. Trump revealed on January 8 that Damac Properties, led by UAE-based billionaire developer Hussain Sajwani, would invest $20 billion in building US data centres. Mubadala seeks to balance AI risks and rewards Saudi networking platform Halo AI secures $6m funding Tighter US chip rules offer challenges and opportunities The Gulf region, primarily Saudi Arabia and the UAE, plays an increasingly important part in the Great Power competition between the US and China, particularly when it comes to the race to secure global leadership in advanced technology for the long term. Mohammed Soliman, a global strategy adviser at McLarty Associates in Washington, said Stargate “feels like a true global tech partnership”, one that brings together “the best of the US, Japan and the UAE”. “The UAE has truly established itself as a cornerstone of the AI revolution,” Soliman told AGBI. “With game-changing deals like the G42-Microsoft partnership and the MGX AI collaboration, it’s exciting to see how Stargate further reflects the country’s growing influence in shaping the future of artificial intelligence on the global stage.”