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President Donald Trump and his United Arab Emirates counterpart have revealed plans to build the largest group of artificial intelligence data centres outside the US, boosting the UAE’s ambitions of becoming a global AI hub.
The announcement came during a Trump visit to Abu Dhabi to meet its president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and other UAE officials. It was the American president’s third stop of a Gulf tour this week that he says has raised trillions of dollars in investment for the US.
AI has been a theme of President Trump’s trip in the Gulf, whose monarchies hope the cutting-edge technology will help diversify their oil-reliant economies, and whose huge sovereign wealth funds are keen to back AI initiatives.
The 10-square-mile UAE-US AI Campus, located in Abu Dhabi and built by Emirati AI company G42, is planned to have 5GW of data centre power — equivalent to more than 2mn of AI chipmaker Nvidia’s latest generation of GB200 chips, experts say.
By comparison, Elon Musk’s “Colossus” AI supercomputer facility in Tennessee runs 200,000 of Nvidia’s previous generation “Hopper” chips.
While only a 1GW data centre is to be launched in the short term, that would still require 500,000 of Nvidia’s latest chips.
Although an important US ally in the Middle East, the UAE is subject to the same export restrictions as dozens of other countries, as the US has sought to limit access to powerful chips made by companies such as Nvidia over concerns that they would leak to China.
The licensing process had slowed down the flow of advanced technology and frustrated Abu Dhabi’s AI ambitions, which range from cultivating advanced industries to becoming the first “AI-native government”.
But the Trump administration appears to be loosening those rules, having officially scrapped a Biden-era licensing regime shortly before it was due to take effect this week. The regulation would have put a cap on the number of chips that so-called tier 2 countries, such as the UAE, could import.
“It seems that the Trump administration is somewhat more eager to encourage AI development outside the United States,” said Thea Kendler, former assistant secretary for export administration at the Department of Commerce under the Biden administration.
Gulf countries will be looking for “reliable access” to chips, said Kendler, now a partner at Mayer Brown. “To invest in the extraordinary infrastructure required for an AI data centre, you want to know that stream of chips — and not just today’s chips, but the next generation and the next generation — will be able to come to you.”
Saudi Arabia and Nvidia struck a deal this week to build “AI factories” powered by the chipmaker’s latest processors.
UAE officials have worked to convince Washington that they are committed to partnering with US AI companies over Chinese ones. G42, the region’s biggest AI company, says it has cut ties to Chinese suppliers. Abu Dhabi funds have backed AI projects in the US, including Sam Altman’s Stargate and BlackRock’s $30bn AI infrastructure fund.
The US commerce department said on Thursday the US and UAE had agreed to a partnership framework on AI, and that the UAE was “committed to safeguarding advanced AI technologies by implementing stringent measures to prevent diversion and ensure controlled access to technology”. It did not say whether regulations around the UAE’s access to chips had been changed.
The powerful computing resources will only be used by “US hyperscalers and approved cloud service providers”, the commerce department added. A White House statement said the agreement included UAE commitments to fund, build or invest in equivalent-sized data centres in the US.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick called the deal “a major milestone in achieving President Trump’s vision for US AI dominance”.
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, G42’s chair and the UAE’s national security adviser, said it “strengthen[ed] the UAE’s position as a hub for cutting-edge research and sustainable development”.
The powerful Abu Dhabi royal had unveiled a UAE pledge to invest $1.4tn in the US over the next decade during a visit to the White House this year.
