14-05-2025
Donald Trump is in Saudi Arabia for his Gulf tour, and so are Elon Musk and Sam Altman. But, why?
United States President Donald Trump is in Saudi Arabia for his official Guld tour. Since landing he has announced a flurry of deals, including in the semiconductors and artificial intelligence space. Later this week, he is also expected to travel to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
But, sharing the stage with Donald Trump, were some other high profile faces. Tesla chief Elon Musk, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi among others. The Washington Post in its reports dubbed it the 'largest single assemblage of America's tech' since Donald Trump's own inauguration in January.
Besides Musk, Altman, Huang and Khosrowshahi, the others who made it to the event were Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, AMD CEO Lisa Su, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's general partner Ben Horowitz, Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney, Google's president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Uber's former CEO and founder Travis Kalanick.
The report further noted that there were some big names that did not make it. These include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Intel's management, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella or President Brad Smith,
The event was promoted as 'the first US-Saudi investment summit', but featured tech industry representatives heavily, when compared to executives from finance, banking and other industries, the report noted.
So, why were they in the Saudi capital of Riyadh? To solicit investment for their AI ambitions from the oil-rich kingdom, the report added. Saudi in turn is looking to diversify from oil into other fields.
Under agreements with the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are poised to win wider access to advanced AI chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) during Donald Trump's Middle-East visits. We list what is on the cards: Inc. and Humain said they would invest more than $5 billion to build an 'AI zone' in Saudi Arabia.
AMD is set to provide chips and software for data centers 'stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States' in a $10 billion project, Humain and AMD said.
Cisco Systems Inc., the world's largest provider of networking gear, is working with Humain to combine its 'global expertise with the kingdom's bold AI ambitions' to build infrastructure. It also extended a partnership with Abu Dhabi AI firm G42.
Global AI, a US tech venture, also plans to collaborate with Humain, in an agreement expected to be worth billions of dollars, sources told Bloomberg.
Nvidia, the world's biggest semiconductor maker, will supply 'several hundred thousand' of its most advancedd AI chips to Saudi Arabia's Humain over the next five years. This includes 18,000 of its cutting-edge GB300 Grace Blackwell products and its InfiniBand networking technology.
The UAE could also get 5,00,000 advanced Nvidia chips each year from now till 2027, sources told Bloomberg. One-fifth would be set aside for G42, while the remainder would go to US companies building data centers in the Gulf nation, they added.
OpenAI is considering building new data center capacity in the UAE, sources said. They added that the details are not final and could change.
Elon Musk's space internet company Starlink has also signed a deal with Saudi Arabia, for service of the Kingdom's aviation and maritime shipping.
Saudi Arabian venture capital firm STV launched a $100 million AI fund with backing from Alphabet Inc.'s Google, focused on early-stage startups in the Middle East and North Africa for infrastructure development, according to a statement. How much Google will contribute is not yet known.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)
