The Big Gulf AI Deal That's Divided the White House
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
It's a few weeks ago, but last month Trump was in the was in Saudi Arabia. He was in the Middle East and he sold a bunch of chips.
Yeah, I think the chips announcement was kind of overshadowed by some of the um pomp and ceremony around that visit. Did you see the um the famous hair flipping?
No. Oh, you didn't see that? What was that? What was that? So
So you need to look this up. So when Trump arrived in the UAE, part of his big uh you know, the greeting and the red carpet getting rolled out for him was uh a bunch of Emirati women doing a uh a hair flipping dance. I gotta say, I wish I could flip my hair like that, but sadly I cannot.
Can I say like Trump seems very at home in the Gulf States. Do you know what I'm saying? Like it y uh it feels like setting aside many other things that there is like a similar sense of aesthetics, grandma. I was about to say that is like I think he's very comfortable in those countries.
I was about to say his taste in interior decorating is exactly the same as what you see in palaces and hotels in Saudi Arabia and places like that. Absolutely.
No, I think just the whole vibe is like oh he's like on uh he's on home territory. But I think the AI stuff is really interesting, obviously, for a lot of reasons. The US wants to sell more things. One of the things that we can sell in various flavors is AI technology. But there's this weird, like, I don't know what the word, cross currents or whatever, which is that we want to sell more stuff, and yet we also don't want our stuff to be in the hands of perceived geopolitical rivals, and so we cut off our own sales. China is obviously the most salient example here. But it sort of makes uh this interesting tension when we think of the role of AI sales, tech sales in sort of international relations and diplomacy?
Yeah. Well, I also find this interesting from the UAE slash Abu Dhabi side of things, right? Because the UAE it it's strategically aligned with the US in many ways, but it's very commercially aligned with China. Um and you know, you have a lot of Chinese commerce coming through the ports and things like that. So I'm very curious what they see in this deal and how they're navigating those two sides as well.
Well, I'm very excited. We have the perfect guest, someone uh one of our colleagues we've had on the podcast before. We're gonna be speaking with Mackenzie Hawkins, tech and geopolitics reporter at Bloomberg News. She's now based in Hong Kong, sadly for us, but thankfully she's uh you know, staying up late for this recording. Uh McKenzie, thank you so much for coming uh back on Odlots.
What was the Trump‑announced AI deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE?
Thanks so much for having me.
First of all, why don't you just give us the the specific details as or the salient details as you understand them in terms of this big AI deal that Trump uh announced when he did his uh his golf tour.
So in the four day span or so that Trump was in the Middle East, you saw American tech companies and companies in Gulf Nations announce hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI deals, specifically many of them focused on AI infrastructure, building out the data centers that house AI chips that are used to train and deploy large language models. And that involved one of the biggest data centers potentially in the world, a project anchored by the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, with key participation from Oracle, from OpenAI, from NVIDIA, huge volumes of NVIDIA chip sales going to both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as sales from NVIDIA's rival, advanced microdevices.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:19
2
What was the Trump‑announced AI deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE?
3:19–9:24
3
Which American tech companies are involved and what projects were announced?
9:24–14:43
4
Why is the deal causing division inside the White House?
14:43–19:58
5
What export‑control safeguards are in place to stop chips reaching China?
19:58–24:50
6
How do the UAE and Saudi Arabia view the partnership and its strategic benefits?
24:50–28:20
Speakers
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