(Reuters) – The Trump administration is weighing a deal that would allow the UAE to import more than a million advanced Nvidia chips, a quantity that far exceeds limits under Biden-era AI chip regulations, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.
The deal, which is still being negotiated and could change, would let the UAE import 500,000 of the most advanced chips on the market each year from now to 2027, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
While one-fifth would be set aside for the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, the rest will go to U.S. companies building data centers in the Gulf nation, according to the report.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which may announce new data-center capacity in the UAE as soon as this week, could be one of those companies, the report said.
The report comes on the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump securing a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States.
The Department of Commerce and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, while Nvidia declined to comment.
Abu Dhabi’s artificial intelligence push has mostly been led by state-backed G42, which has drawn increased scrutiny from China hawks in Washington amid fears that the UAE is becoming a conduit for China to receive advanced American AI technology it is blocked from getting directly from the U.S.
According to the Bloomberg report, G42 could purchase computing capabilities equivalent to between 1 million and 1.5 million H100 chips over the lifetime of the deal. That is around four times more than it would have been allowed to buy under a Biden-era chip export control framework, known as AI diffusion, it said.
Trump’s administration plans to rescind and modify this rule, which curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce had said last week.
(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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