US President Donald Trump's undersecretary of state for economic affairs has praised a recently announced “assurance compute framework” by UAE's G42.
Jacob Helberg spoke about the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm when giving evidence to a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on US national security and commercial diplomacy.
“The reason that G42's announcement yesterday is significant is because it sets a pilot for a potential model on a voluntary basis for a large company to use cryptographic tracking and end-user verifications,” he said.
“They agreed to build a common operating picture that could allow American policymakers to actually have total transparency and assurance that the clusters in the UAE used and owned by G42 are not being accessed improperly.” This was in reference to US chip export rules designed to prevent powerful American technology from falling into the hands of potentially adversarial entities.
Mr Helberg was asked about the UAE's procurement of US AI technology and how to keep American-designed semiconductors out of China, Washington's main rival in the AI race.
“When the US government expresses concerns to the UAE government on various transactions involving China, the UAE has worked to address those concerns,” he said. Those worries about Beijing are not unique to the UAE, but can include a “vast majority of US partners” such as Canada, he added.
“The UAE is an incredibly important partner. They are a major investor who has pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in the US.”
Late last year, the Trump administration gave the UAE approval to import US-based Nvidia's most powerful chips, deemed by many to be crucial to AI buildout.
The deal was sealed months after Mr Trump's visit to the UAE, where it was announced the country would be building a 5 gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus.
During former president Joe Biden's time in office, significantly stricter AI chip export rules were put in place to prevent China obtaining US technology but those efforts put American allies in limbo and limited their ability to procure powerful semiconductors.
Companies such as Microsoft and Nvidia lobbied against those export rules, saying they would hurt efforts by US companies to provide technology to allies and, in turn, cause them to turn to China to fulfil their needs.
G42, which has been approved to purchase the powerful Nvidia chips, on Monday released details on “its intent to develop and implement an enhanced assurance framework designed to secure the export, deployment, and stewardship of advanced US-origin artificial intelligence semiconductors operating within its infrastructure”.
The Trump White House has come under bipartisan criticism for allowing the export of a less powerful Nvidia chip, the H200, to China.
“[It's] hard to see how Commerce could approve these sales, given these companies have ties to Chinese security services and US shortages of AI compute,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in Washington, who has been outspoken against the move.
