The Trump administration is weighing a deal that would allow the United Arab Emirates to import more than a million advanced Nvidia Corp. chips, people familiar with the matter said, a quantity that far exceeds limits under Biden-era AI chip regulations — and one that’s raised concerns that American hardware risks ending up in China’s hands.
The deal, which is still being negotiated and could change, would let the UAE import 500,000 of the most advanced chips on the market each year from now to 2027, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential conversations. One-fifth would be set aside for the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, while the remainder would go to US companies building data centers in the Gulf nation, according to the people.
One of those companies could be OpenAI, which may announce new data center capacity in the UAE as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter said. The people emphasized that discussions around that deal remain fluid.
Read More: OpenAI Weighs UAE Data Center Deal as Trump Set to Visit
Over the lifetime of the broader deal, G42 could purchase computing capabilities equivalent to between 1 million and 1.5 million H100 chips, Nvidia’s current best offering, the people said. That total is around four times more than G42 would have been allowed to buy under a Biden-era chip export control framework, known as AI diffusion, that Trump plans to scrap, according to the people. It’s on par with the number of chips needed to power a planned Meta Platforms Inc. data center in Louisiana that’s so large it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan.
All told, if the deal moves forward in its current form, it would mark a sea change in US policy toward AI development in the Middle East and specifically the United Arab Emirates, where US officials have long been wary of government officials’ and private companies’ ties to Beijing. The US has restricted advanced chip sales to China since 2022, an effort to prevent Beijing from making gains in AI that could benefit its military. One year later, the US expanded those rules to countries including the UAE over concerns that China may be able to access leading-edge chips via intermediaries.
Earlier: US Weighs Easing Nvidia Chip Curbs on UAE as Trump Plans Visit
It’s unclear what national security conditions Trump officials would apply to the UAE chip sales, the people said. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, G42 agreed to divest from China’s Huawei Technologies Co. to pave the way for a $1.5 billion Microsoft Corp. partnership that includes data centers in the Gulf nation. But some Pentagon officials have been skeptical that G42 will entirely uncouple from China, Bloomberg has reported, despite the UAE’s repeated assurances that it will abide by the terms of the deal. Other US officials have questioned the wisdom of shipping advanced AI capabilities to Gulf states with questionable human-rights records.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nvidia, G42, the UAE embassy in the US and OpenAI declined to comment. The New York Times previously reported some details of the discussions.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday began a tour of the Middle East with a stop in Saudi Arabia, after which he will travel to Qatar and then the United Arab Emirates. The US is also considering an agreement to grant Saudi Arabia more access to advanced semiconductors, a move that would boost the kingdom’s AI ambitions.
Read More: US to Boost Saudi AI Chip Access Even as China Issues Linger
Trump could unveil the UAE chip accord during his visit there, the people said, while emphasizing that the details are still under active deliberation. Central to the conversations with the UAE is White House AI Adviser David Sacks, who spent several days in the country ahead of Trump’s trip.
As part of that visit, Sacks met with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the country’s president, who traveled to Washington earlier this year in part to press Trump officials for easier access to Nvidia chips. During Sheikh Tahnoon’s March trip, the UAE pledged to spend $1.4 trillion on US tech, energy and infrastructure — something that aided its pitch to buy more American semiconductors, Bloomberg has reported.
“US companies still have the best technology but we are no longer the only game in town; it is well understood that China is catching up fast,” Sacks wrote in a post on X about his meeting with Sheikh Tahnoon. “The country that builds its partner ecosystem the fastest is the one that will win this high-stakes competition. Effective AI diplomacy is vital now more than ever.”
Sacks’ argument — that the US semiconductor lead over China is narrowing — is one that several company executives have made as they urged the Trump administration to rescind some Biden-era chip export controls. But that point has not assuaged the concerns of many China hawks in Washington, who remain worried that China could either acquire physical chips from the UAE or tap the capabilities of those chips via the cloud. It’s unclear whether the Trump administration plans to restrict UAE data centers powered by American chips from being used to train Chinese AI models.
Prospects of a UAE accord stirred objections from a key lawmaker on the House Select Committee on China, which has long sounded the alarm about G42’s ties to Huawei and other companies in China.
“Deals like this require scrutiny and verifiable guardrails,” Representative John Moolenaar, the top Republican on the panel, said in a post on X. “We raised concerns about G42 last year for this very reason—and we need safeguards in place before more agreements move forward.”
