Inside the Rift Over Trump’s A.I. Deals in the Gulf

President Trump is set to wrap up his Middle East trip today, a visit that produced a slew of business deals.Credit…Brian Snyder/Reuters

Cashing in chips

Whatever ambitious foreign policy goals President Trump held for his Middle East trip, at least the entourage of business leaders who’ve accompanied him there seem happy.

The president is set to wrap up his three-country tour on Friday, after striking a litany of pledges by oil-rich Gulf states to deepen business ties with U.S. companies. “We’re developing a lot of fans,” Trump said at a news conference on Friday.

But the deal flow is already drawing political pushback at home.

A recap: The American chip giants Nvidia and AMD will now be allowed to sell advanced chips to Saudi, Emirati and Qatari customers as those countries seek to become powerhouses in artificial intelligence. One customer is an enormous new A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi whose ambitions rival Stargate, the OpenAI-led venture, in size.

The deals underscore a rift in the Trump administration on A.I. David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, venture capitalists who’ve become the president’s top A.I. advisers, were chief negotiators of the deals, The Times reports, working closely with C.E.O.s including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Sam Altman of OpenAI. Also in the picture was Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the head of the Emirati sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment, which has become a major financer of A.I. initiatives.

The agreements have raised questions from security hawks in both U.S. political parties. The administration of former President Joe Biden had put limits on exports of advanced tech to the region, partly because of fears the equipment might find its way to China.

Some Trump officials are already weighing how to pause the deals over concerns they risk breaching security red lines, including that the technology could fall into the wrong hands, according to Bloomberg.