U.S. President Donald Trump signs a guest book next to United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, at Qasr Al Watan, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, May 15, 2025.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. and United Arab Emirates are working on a path to allow Abu Dhabi to purchase some of the most advanced American-made semiconductors for its AI development, U.S. President Donald Trump said from the Emirati capital 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 while attending the U.S.-UAE Business Council breakfast during the last day of his four-day visit to the Middle East.
The "very big contract" in question could be in reference to a reported preliminary agreement with the UAE that would permit it to import 500,000 of Nvidia's H100 chips per year — the most advanced chips that the American company produces. This would accelerate the desert sheikhdom's ability to build data centers needed to power its AI models.
The UAE has invested heavily in AI infrastructure in recent years with the aim of becoming a global hub for the technology. Central to that goal are U.S. semiconductors, which have yet to reach Washington's Arab Gulf allies due to national security concerns.
This could become a thing of the past, as the Trump administration plans to rescind a Biden era "AI diffusion rule," which imposed strict export controls on advanced AI chips even to U.S.-friendly nations.
Veteran security professionals and lawmakers, however — along with, reportedly, some members of the Trump administration — have expressed concerns that doing away with these limits could open the door for the sensitive American technology to end up in the hands of rivals like China.
Trump's comments came a day after the White House announced a partnership with the UAE to build a massive artificial intelligence campus in Abu Dhabi, touted as the largest such facility outside of the U.S.
The data center will be built by the Emirati technology firm G42, which will partner with several U.S. companies on the facility, according to a release from the Department of Commerce. It will have a 5-gigawatt capacity and cover 10 square miles.
The names of the U.S. firms involved were not disclosed. A phalanx of top America tech CEOs accompanied Trump on his Middle East trip, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and Cisco President Jeetu Patel.
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