Artificial Intelligence

US ‘to let UAE import millions of Nvidia’s AI chips’

By Reuters

May 15, 2025, 9:21 AM

The US has a preliminary agreement with the United Arab Emirates to allow it to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips per year starting in 2025, sources said.

The move will boost the Emirates’ construction of data centres that are vital to developing artificial intelligence models.

The sources said the agreement was at least through to 2027, but that there was a chance it could be in place until 2030.

The draft deal called for 20 percent of the chips, or 100,000 per year, to go to UAE’s tech firm G42, while the rest would be split among US companies with massive AI operations like Microsoft and Oracle that might also seek to build data centres in the UAE.

The agreement is still being negotiated and could change before being finalised, the sources said. One added that the deal, elements of which were first reported by the New York Times, faced growing opposition in the US government.

On the first day of Trump’s Middle East tour this week, the US authorities cleared the sale of 18,000 of Nvidia’s latest GB300 Grace Blackwell chips to an AI company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The Biden administration issued restrictions on AI chip exports to control the flow of the sophisticated processors worldwide, in part to keep the prized semiconductors from being diverted to China, where they could bolster Beijing’s military.

US President Donald Trump this week is on a tour of the Gulf region and on Tuesday announced $600 billion worth of commitments from Saudi Arabia, including deals to buy large quantities of chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm.

Trump has made improving ties with some Gulf countries a key goal of his administration.

The chips in the UAE deal that would go to G42 would represent a tripling or quadrupling, in terms of compute power, that would have been available to the UAE under rules put in place by the administration of former President Joe Biden. The Trump administration said last week it planned to rescind that regulation.

At present, the vast majority of AI computing power is deployed in the United States and China. If all the proposed deals in Gulf states, and the UAE in particular, come together, the region would become a third power centre in global AI competition.

The US Commerce Department, which oversees export controls, did not comment. Neither did the White House, G42 and the United Arab Emirates. Nvidia declined to comment.

Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, the UAE’s ruling family and US private equity firm Silver Lake hold stakes in G42. The tech holding group’s chairman, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the UAE national security adviser and brother of the Emirates’ president.

Trump in the Middle East

The preliminary agreement also aims to promote data centre in the US. It currently says that for every facility G42 builds in the UAE, it must build a similar one in the US, the sources said.

One of the sources said the definition of what is an advanced AI chip would be figured out in a separate working group that will be created later, along with security requirements.

The proposed numbers of chips are thought to be for the most advanced graphics processing units. That could refer to Nvidia Blackwell chips, which are more powerful than the previous generation of Hopper chips, or Nvidia’s forthcoming Rubin chips, which are more powerful than both of their predecessors.