A tarmac greeting from Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman wasn’t the only consequential handshake during President Trump’s Middle East excursion this week.
During his first stop in Riyadh, POTUS attended a US-Saudi business forum that was a dealmaking fest for American tech CEOs. Trump announced that the Gulf Kingdom plans to invest $600 billion into the US—with much of that cash due to land in Silicon Valley.
Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions
Though the White House itemized only $283 billion of deals, the oil-flush nation appears serious about harnessing American tech know-how to pivot away from its reliance on oil exports and position itself as an AI powerhouse in the region. The deals in the center of the spotlight were spearheaded by the newly launched AI enterprise Humain, owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
- Nvidia will send 18,000 of some of its most advanced AI chips to power a massive 500 megawatt data center that Humain plans to build in the Kingdom. Shares popped 3.97% on the news and have climbed 14.84% this week, putting Nvidia back into positive territory this year.
- Meanwhile, its cross-town rival AMD announced a $10 billion collaboration to supply its own chips to Humain, in exchange for cash and cheap energy. AMD’s shares surged 4.18% on news of the deal on Tuesday and are on track to gain 12.07% this week.
- And Amazon entered a $5 billion partnership with Humain to build an “AI Zone” packed with Amazon Web Service infrastructure catering to AI companies in the region. Shares are up 6.20% this week.
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Saudi company DataVolt will plug US data centers and energy infrastructure with $20 billion. And Uber said it plans to start an autonomous ride hailing service in the country by the end of the year, after inking an agreement with the Saudi transportation regulator.
It’s just the beginning
The Trump Administration is gearing up to ink a deal with Saudi Arabia to ease restrictions on supplying cutting-edge AI chips to the kingdom, which will remove obstacles for Nvidia and AMD to access Saudi’s cash on tap, Bloomberg reported. A key part of the agreement would be safety provisions aimed at preventing China from accessing the tech, which is a major security concern for US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
In more good news for Nvidia, the US reportedly has a preliminary agreement with the United Arab Emirates to let the country import 500,000 chips to be used by the homegrown AI company G42 and US tech firms building data centers there. News also broke earlier today that several unnamed US tech firms are partnering with the UAE to build the world’s largest artificial intelligence campus.
On top of AI tech…Saudi Arabia also said it will import $142 billion of cutting-edge American weapons. And Qatar, where Trump stopped by after, announced plans to acquire up to 210 Boeing planes for as much as $96 billion. The Seattle-based planemaker’s shares are up 7% this week.—SK