Colin Powers in Phenomenal World:
In May 2025, Donald Trump, accompanied by many of Silicon Valley’s luminaries, traveled to Saudi Arabia, Doha, and Abu Dhabi for the first overseas venture of his Presidential term. The same day he touched down in Riyadh, the President rescinded the Biden-era “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion.” Through the Framework, Trump’s predecessor had imposed detailed export controls on US chips, seeking to protect strategic technologies and contain the rise of China. In the Gulf, Trump revealed a more transactional approach—one jointly aimed at self-enrichment and consolidating the dominance of American firms within key markets.
In the policy pivot, Trump’s hosts saw a golden opportunity. Pledging up to $1 trillion in US-bound investment, the Saudis secured the right to import 18,000 units of Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell server, the GB300. 1 The UAE’s Group 42 Holding Ltd (G42)—the technology holding company through which Abu Dhabi runs most of its artificial intelligence (AI) ventures—was meanwhile given permission to import 500,000 units of Nvidia’s H100 chips annually.2 This marked a striking reversal. For the past two decades, the Gulf had pumped credit and equity into the American tech ecosystem. While such financial flows have by no means dried up, new AI arrangements signal that these countries are now beginning to onshore critical elements of American tech’s infrastructure. The recent Nvidia deals, and the geoeconomic pivot they represent, pose a number of questions. Why has Washington moved away from its protectionist approach and pursued these commercial ties with the Gulf? Why have Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, in turn, placed such a major bet on American AI? What does this mean for US imperial strategy more broadly?
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