Essay by Daniel Benaim: “When U.S. President Donald Trump visited the Arab Gulf in May, his focus was not on Gaza, Iran, or even normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Instead, it was on business deals and, above all, artificial intelligence. During the trip, Trump agreed to sell advanced U.S. chips to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and to invest in AI mega-campuses in the Gulf that will host U.S. firms. One such site, in Abu Dhabi, could become the worldʼs largest concentrated cluster of the computing power fueling artificial intelligence. The Gulf countries, in turn, promised to invest tens of billions of dollars in AI on U.S. soil. And last month, during his trip to Washington, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS) won final approval to import tens of thousands of advanced U.S. semiconductors, which had been promised to Saudi Arabia earlier in the year.
Armed with chips, sovereign wealth, and abundant energy, Gulf states could surpass Europe and India in terms of AI infrastructure—eventually becoming the world’s third biggest hub for AI computing power, behind the United States and China. Computing power has now taken its place alongside crude oil as a pillar of the U.S.-Gulf relationship, and the Gulf states have become a partner of first resort for the Trump administration.
The upside of this AI cooperation is significant. If done right, the deals will channel the vast wealth of Gulf states into American AI companies and allow these firms to expand to areas with few power and permitting bottlenecks. With the Gulf’s connectivity to surrounding regions, the reach of the United States’ AI stack—that is, the layers of hardware and software that AI is built on—could extend to billions of users across Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East. The deals could also enable the United States to dislodge China as the Gulf’s top technology partner, which would be a big win for Washington over Beijing…(More)”.
