US President Donald Trump's four-day visit to the Gulf was full of cultural exchanges and, more importantly, deals. During the first foreign tour of his second presidency, Mr Trump secured $2 trillion in commercial deals and investment agreements for the US, according to the White House.
Different topics were on the table during the tour. However, some were more present throughout, such as technology and AI.
- Saudi Arabia's commitment to investing $600 billion in the US is through a series of deals in energy, defence, technology, infrastructure and critical minerals. Among those, Riyadh data infrastructure and analytics company DataVolt will invest $20 billion in AI data centres.
- Nvidia will begin shipping thousands of its most advanced Blackwell chips to Saudi Arabia for use in a 500MW data centre. The Blackwell chips were under export restrictions at the end of former US President Joe Biden's term. These restrictions separated countries into different tiers, and before Trump's announcement, Saudi Arabia was part of the second tier.
- Major US tech companies such as Nvidia and Amazon Web Services plan to work with the Saudi Public Investment Fund's recently announced artificial intelligence company Humain.
- In Qatar, Quantinuum secured one of the largest deals in the quantum computing sector to date with Qatari-owned Al Rabban Capital. The investment agreement of $1 billion aims to expand quantum technologies and workforce development.
- Finally, during Mr Trump's visit to the UAE, the US agreed to strengthen its partnership with the Emirates. Qualcomm will expand its global innovation footprint through partnerships with Adio and e&, in addition to a new global engineering centre in Abu Dhabi, focusing on AI, data centres, and industrial internet of things technology, according to the White House fact sheet.
