U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman pose for a photo with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, and other attendees at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2025.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
The United States has approved the sale of advanced products Nvidia It provided chips to Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and the United Arab Emirates’ G42, and authorized state-backed companies to buy up to 35,000 chips worth an estimated $1 billion.
The approval of these chip exports marks a major reversal for the United States, which previously balked at the idea of direct exports to state-backed AI companies in the Gulf. Export controls were put in place to prevent advanced American technology from entering China through the back door of the Gulf Arab states.
Before leaving office in January, former President Joe Biden implemented the final round of export restrictions on advanced AI chips targeting companies such as Nvidia, in a sweeping effort to put cutting-edge American intellectual property out of China’s reach.
The U.S. Department of Commerce said in a statement Wednesday that President Donald Trump is now seeking to expand the use of these advanced technologies to “promote America’s continued AI dominance and global technological leadership.”
The U.S. Department of Commerce approved the chip exports on the condition that state-backed AI companies agree to “rigorous security and reporting requirements” overseen by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.
Saudi Arabia’s Victory Lap
The export approval follows Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington this week, in which the country pledged to spend $1 trillion in spending with the United States, up from the $600 billion originally pledged during President Trump’s Gulf tour in May.
“Even if we don’t get there, there’s something on both sides in this game,” Afshin Moravy, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy.
HUMAIN, a Saudi Arabian AI company backed by about $1 trillion in public investment funds, signed a long list of partnerships with Adobe, Qualcomm, AMD, Cisco, GlobalAI, Groq, Luma and xAI at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington DC this week. Notably, HUMAIN will partner with Elon Musk’s xAI to build a 500 MW data center in the Kingdom.
“What we want to do in 2026 is to build in one year the same capacity that Saudi Arabia has built over the past 20 years,” HUMAIN CEO Tarek Amin said at the summit. HUMAIN wants to position Saudi Arabia as the world’s third largest AI hub after the US and China.
persuade the US Department of Commerce
Kamil Dimich, partner and portfolio manager at North of South Capital, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy in an interview Wednesday that Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and UAE’s G42 “have the capital to invest, the relationship with Nvidia, and the U.S. government.”
G42 and HUMAIN can “use this to build regional infrastructure, and we want to leverage that infrastructure to become a global hub for computing,” Dimmich added.
Just two weeks ago microsoft Secured a license to export advanced chips to the UAE. Although Microsoft’s main partner in the UAE is G42, local AI companies have not been prominently involved in Microsoft’s announcements until today.
