U.S. President Donald Trump is shown with United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, at Qasr Al Watan, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, May 15, 2025.
- “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,” Trump said in remarks from Abu Dhabi.
- The UAE has invested heavily in AI infrastructure in recent years with the aim of becoming a global hub for the technology. –
- The Gulf country has been limited by U.S. national security regulations on chip exports.
- 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 NVIDIA H100 GPU costs approximately $25,000 per unit. However, some configurations, such as the NVIDIA H100 80GB GPU, can be priced as high as $31000. The total cost can escalate depending on system setups, additional infrastructure, and networking requirements, about 13 to 17 $billion a year
- 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.
- CNBC