Middle East/GULF DEALS THREAD: Emiratis use a Trump-affiliated digital coin was announced in a panel that included the president’s son & biz partner

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

At a Dubai Conference, Trump’s Conflicts Take Center Stage

A deal for a state-backed Emirati firm to use a Trump-affiliated digital coin was announced in a panel that included the president’s son and his business partner, who promised, “This is only the beginning.”

www.nytimes.com

At a Dubai Conference, Trump’s Conflicts Take Center Stage​

A deal for a state-backed Emirati firm to use a Trump-affiliated digital coin was announced in a panel that included the president’s son and his business partner, who promised, “This is only the beginning.”​

May 1, 2025Updated 3:17 p.m. ET

Eric Trump, right, and Zach Witkoff speaking at a cryptocurrency convention in Dubai on Thursday.Katarina Premfors for The New York Times
Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.
That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s crypto firm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, revealed that a so-called stablecoin developed by the firm would be used to complete the transaction between the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX and Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world.
Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest.
MGX’s use of the World Liberty stablecoin, USD1, brings a Trump family company into business with a venture firm backed by a foreign government. The deal creates a formal link between World Liberty and Binance — a company that has been under U.S. government oversight since 2023, when it admitted to violating federal money-laundering laws.
And the splashy announcement served as an advertisement to crypto investors worldwide about the potential for forming a partnership with a company tied to President Trump, who is listed as World Liberty’s chief crypto advocate.
“We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us,” said Mr. Witkoff, who is the son of the White House envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. “It’s only the beginning.”
Mr. Witkoff and Eric Trump were speaking on a panel at Token2049, a major crypto conference in the United Arab Emirates, where more than 10,000 digital currency enthusiasts have gathered for a week of networking. It was the latest stop in an international tour by Mr. Witkoff, who visited Pakistan last month with his business partners to meet the prime minister and other government officials. Eric Trump, who runs the family business, has spent the week in Dubai, where he announced plans to back a Trump-branded hotel and tower.
The president himself is set to travel to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.A.E. on a state visit in two weeks.
His son’s panel with Mr. Witkoff was the most anticipated event of the Dubai conference. The auditorium, inside a luxury resort on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was packed with crypto investors from around the world, many of whom had to stand in the aisles or lean on pillows propped against the walls to watch the conversation.
“This is just one incredible country,” Mr. Witkoff said from the stage. “One of the most innovative, if not the most innovative, country on planet Earth today.”
Representatives for Binance, MGX and World Liberty did not respond to requests for comment.
Once a crypto skeptic, President Trump embraced digital currencies on the campaign trail last year as the industry poured tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election. In September, he and his sons unveiled World Liberty, which they pitched as a new kind of internet bank that would allow people to borrow and lend money using cryptocurrencies.
Since then, World Liberty has sold $550 million worth of a new cryptocurrency called $WLFI, with a large cut of the revenue earmarked for a business entity tied to the Trump family. In March, the company also created a stablecoin — a type of digital currency designed to maintain a price of $1, making it convenient to use for large transactions because its value doesn’t swing like a stock’s.
The company’s dealings have created conflicts of interest with no precedent in modern U.S. history. Some of the investors who bought $WLFI coins are foreign nationals who have been barred from supporting a president via campaign contributions or donations to the inaugural fund. And many of the firm’s corporate partners have clear incentives to curry favor with the federal government as they seek to expand in the American market.
Even the roster of panelists onstage in Dubai highlighted how much the Trump family’s business interests now blur with United States policy and regulation.
Sitting alongside Mr. Witkoff and Eric Trump was one of World Liberty’s top investors, Justin Sun, a Chinese-born billionaire who runs the crypto platform TRON. Mr. Sun bought $75 million in $WLFI coins after the election.
About a year earlier, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Mr. Sun, accusing him of manipulating the price of a TRON cryptocurrency. When Mr. Trump took office, the S.E.C. asked a federal judge to pause the case while the agency negotiated a settlement, which the judge did.
“I just got to thank you for the support, Justin,” Mr. Witkoff said. “TRON is just an incredible technology, and we’re lucky to be partners with you.”
Soon Mr. Witkoff delivered the panel’s big reveal.
In March, Binance announced that MGX, an investment fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi, would invest $2 billion in the exchange using stablecoins. But which particular stablecoin it would use to do that had not been disclosed.
The coin chosen for the transaction was World Liberty’s USD1, Mr. Witkoff said.
“Wow,” Mr. Sun responded.
Leaders of MGX and Binance have had high-stakes dealings with U.S. officials.
MGX is led by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Emirati royal who serves as the nation’s national security adviser. In March, Sheikh Tahnoon visited the United States for meetings with President Trump and some of his cabinet members and advisers.
In 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to charges that it had violated U.S. anti-money-laundering laws and allowed criminals to transact on its platform. As part of a settlement with the Justice Department and other federal agencies, the company was placed under a Treasury Department monitorship to ensure that it would comply with the law.
In recent months, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, has been seeking a pardon from the Trump administration, after he pleaded guilty to a money laundering violation and spent four months in federal prison.
The role of USD1 in Binance’s deal with MGX provides major financial support to World Liberty.
Stablecoin issuers like World Liberty make money by accepting deposits from investors, giving them stablecoins in return and then investing those deposits to generate a yield that the issuer keeps.
The precise details of World Liberty’s arrangement with MGX and Binance are unclear. But it appears that, with one deal, World Liberty now has $2 billion in deposits to invest. Those funds alone could generate tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for the Trump family and its partners at World Liberty.
Ultimately, Mr. Witkoff said from the stage in Dubai, he expects the World Liberty stablecoin to grow even bigger, reaching “many billions of market cap.”
Someday, he continued, visitors to the United Arab Emirates might even use the USD1 coin to pay at the Four Seasons in Abu Dhabi.
At that, Eric Trump broke in with a correction.
“You’re not going to be walking into the Four Seasons using USD1,” he said. “You’re going to be walking into the Trump International Hotel and Tower.”
David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from San Francisco. He can be reached at davidyb@nytimes.com.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[Dirty Mcdrawz]

Blatant corruption in broad daylight

 

[bnew]

wheres the posters who kept ranting about the biden crime family?

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

wheres the posters who kept ranting about the biden crime family?

Donald Jr. and Eric Trump Pursue New Deals That Would Enrich President Trump

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump spent the past two weeks traveling the world and announcing new ventures involving billions of dollars.

www.nytimes.com

Trump Sons’ Deals on Three Continents Directly Benefit the President
Summarize
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump spent the past two weeks traveling the world and announcing new ventures involving billions of dollars.

May 5, 2025Updated 8:26 a.m. ET

Eric Trump in Doha, the Qatari capital, on Wednesday, looking over a model of a development the Trump Organization plans to build there.Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A contest of sorts has played out across Europe, the United States and the Middle East in recent days as President Trump’s two older sons have pursued a blitz of family moneymaking ventures capitalizing on their father’s name and power, each seemingly trying to outdo the other.

It is a rush to cash in that involves billions of dollars with few precedents in American history.

A luxury hotel in Dubai. A second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States. A new golf course and villa complex in Qatar. And a new private club in Washington. In many cases these new deals promoted over the last week will personally benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but also President Trump himself.

Donald Trump Jr.’s image projected on a screen as he sits and talks with a man at a conference in the foreground.
Donald Trump Jr. spoke with Antoni Trenchev, a cryptocurrency platform co-founder and a former Bulgarian lawmaker, during a Trump Business Vision event in Sofia, Bulgaria, last week.Nexo
“Challenge everything,” said the brochure for the new $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower planned for Dubai, where units went on sale for the first time at prices reaching $20 million apiece, after a giant party held in Dubai this past week to honor Eric Trump and the new project. “Stop at nothing.”

The marathon of deal making has been so rapid that many elements have drawn limited public attention in the United States, despite most of it being out in the open. That is in part because the sons appeared before mostly fawning crowds but also because President Trump, his appointees and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk were making headlines with their own steady stream of norm-breaking controversies.

“There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian who has written books on Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford, addressing the financial conflicts of interest that have emerged in Mr. Trump’s second term.

Both Trump sons are involved in a wide range of family business ventures. Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, runs the Trump Organization, the main family business, which specializes in real estate. He also serves on the board of a holding company that oversees World Liberty Financial, the family’s crypto firm, and recently joined forces with his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., to start a Bitcoin mining operation, American Bitcoin.

The White House has said there are no ethics issues because Mr. Trump’s sons run the businesses. “The president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said. “There are no conflicts of interest.”

But Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure report, which he is legally required to file, shows that he still personally benefits financially from most of these ventures.

Eric Trump noted that many of the ventures they are promoting — from crypto to real estate — were underway before their father was re-elected. “We are building the most iconic projects on earth and leading the way in the digital revolution,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The New York Times.

Donald Trump Jr. rejected any suggestion that he was trading on his father’s name, saying he has been a businessman his entire adult life. He then took a swipe at Hunter Biden, who sold paintings while his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., served as president.

“It’s laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room while my father is president and cease doing what I’ve been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to The Times. “However, if I did do that, I guess I could always take up painting, which I hear can be quite lucrative.”

Indeed, relatives of other presidents — including Billy Carter (brother of President Jimmy Carter) and Neil Bush (brother of President George W. Bush), along with Hunter Biden — have had business dealings that have created questions about potential conflicts of interest.

What distinguishes the work of Mr. Trump’s two sons is that several of these ventures, including the real estate deals and crypto efforts, bring revenues that benefit the president himself as well.

Just in the past 10 days, Donald Trump Jr. made stops in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria on a paid-speech tour he has called “Trump Business Vision 2025,” which also included visits with foreign government leaders and political candidates. During roughly the same time, Eric Trump was shuttling among Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East spots to push the family’s real estate and crypto plans.

These pitches played out even as some of Donald Trump Jr.’s business partners were simultaneously rolling out yet another business in Washington that will cash in on his father’s return to the White House: a club called Executive Branch.

At $500,000 a person, the private membership club is slated to open by this summer in Georgetown in a sprawling, but defunct, restaurant called Clubhouse. It will feature two bars, a lounge, a restaurant and boardroom — re-creating the role previously served by the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where donors and acolytes of the president gathered until the family sold it off after Mr. Trump’s first term.

A stone building with the words “Trump International Hotel” in gold over a staircase leading to an entrance.
The Trump International Hotel in Washington, which Mr. Trump sold in 2022. His oldest son is now helping open a new D.C. club called Executive Branch.Kenny Holston for The New York Times
The club soon likely will be jammed with Trump family friends, business executives and members of the Trump administration, but will be off limits to members of the public and most members of the news media.

An A-list party was held late last month to celebrate the launch of Executive Branch — while Donald Trump Jr. was in Europe — at a hotel a block from the White House. Attendees included Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Paul Atkins, the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The founding members of the club, which has already sold many of its membership slots according to organizers, include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the cryptocurrency executives whose company, Gemini Trust, had been targeted by the S.E.C. until Mr. Trump named new agency leaders, who in April put a hold on the federal lawsuit.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and top Trump fund-raiser, is another founding member. In the first quarter of this year, he has registered to represent 39 new corporate clients, including the crypto firm Tether, an overseas operation that was a longtime target of U.S. regulators until recently, when it began to establish itself as a major force in Washington and explore opening a U.S. office.

The other owners at the new club, besides Donald Trump Jr., include Zach and Alex Witkoff — the sons of Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy — and Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, a Florida-based venture capital firm that recently hired Donald Trump Jr. as a senior executive. The investments for 1789 Capital have included companies such as Plaid, a digital finance firm that had lobbied the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau related to a new set of banking rules — until Mr. Trump’s team effectively shut down the agency and stalled enforcement of the regulation.

David Sacks, who is a crypto adviser to Mr. Trump and another founding member, said the goal is not to create a venue for access. Rather, he said in a recent podcast, “we want a place to hang out in D.C.” for the “younger, hipper, Trump-aligned Republican.”

Several people gathered and talking while wearing red “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hats.
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who both are helping promote the family cryptocurrency business, have been traveling the world to attend crypto conferences, including this one in Abu Dhabi in December.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Even as these real-life ventures were playing out, another push for profit was underway in the virtual world. Investors in the $Trump memecoin are bidding to become the top 220 owners of the collectible coin and win a dinner with the president later this month. A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot that has no practical function other than speculation.

The $Trump memecoin is controlled by a company run by the Trump sons and their business partners, but President Trump has actively encouraged his supporters to buy it.

Javier Selgas, chief executive at Fr8Tech, a shipping company, announced this past week — while Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were abroad — that his Monterrey, Mexico-based company would spend $20 million to buy $Trump memecoin tokens.

Buying the tokens — in essence, giving money to the Trump family — is “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.,” Mr. Selgas said in a statement, which was also filed with the S.E.C., as his company is publicly traded.

In some cases, the Trump-family announcements over the past week have involved foreign governments, including those of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Eric Trump flew to Doha, the capital of the tiny Middle East nation of Qatar, on Wednesday as a government official there signed a deal with a Saudi-based real estate company to build a new Trump golf course and luxury villa complex, a partnership that will bring millions of dollars in branding and management fees to the Trump family.

This is one of six real-estate projects now planned in the Middle East, sponsored by Dar Global, the international subsidiary of a Saudi-based real estate firm with close ties to the Saudi royal family. The other projects are in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai.

“They always arrive at the word ‘yes,’ which is a beautiful thing,” Eric Trump said while in Dubai this past week, saying that it took only a month to get the required real estate permits from the government there. “They do it quickly.”

On a crypto conference panel in Dubai, Eric Trump sat next to Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, who announced that a venture capital firm backed by the government of Abu Dhabi would invest $2 billion using a form of digital currency offered by World Liberty. This deal alone could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Trump family and its partners.

Donald Trump Jr. had gotten a head start on his brother, arriving on April 25 in Budapest, where he had a brief meeting with Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, and then was paid to appear at a dinner gathering among business leaders.

“I’m just here as a business guy, but as someone who understands how the world works,” Donald Trump Jr. told an executive from Portfolio Hungary, the organization that sponsored the event, adding that while he was in Eastern Europe and the Balkans he was looking for possible new deals. “You never know if there is going to be a Trump real estate deal.”

His next stop was Serbia, where the Trump family is planning a new hotel on land owned by the government there. He met with President Aleksandar Vucic, whose administration approved the hotel project, which also includes Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, as the developer. “No one has ever said that we are inhospitable: We prepared this pig for Donald Jr Trump,” Mr. Vucic boasted on his Facebook page, about his meal with Mr. Trump.

Donald Trump Jr. then moved on to Bulgaria, where he appeared on a stage along with Antoni Trenchev, the co-founder of a cryptocurrency firm called Nexo that was fined $45 million by the S.E.C. in 2023 and agreed to leave the U.S. marketplace.

With Donald Trump Jr. at his side, Mr. Trenchev announced that Nexo had already talked to United States regulators and it was re-entering the U.S. market. “America is back — and so is Nexo,” Mr. Trenchev said, celebrating his meeting where he paid to be with the son of the president of the United States, as well as the company’s pending return to the market there.

President Trump, in recent days, was doing his part as well to help drive business to the family.

He attended a fund-raising event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this past weekend. That makes his 10th visit to the club since he returned to the White House in January, with many of the weekend visits featuring political gatherings that pay bills to his family.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[darkmanp]

The corruption is clearly obvious, but who will hold Trump accountable? Trump is the final authority of the DOJ, and he is not going to make the same mistake of allowing a special council probe like last term. State prosecutors are hesitant because he will retaliate with the full force of the federal government (cutting state bugets, having DOJ launch investigations into prosecutors, etc.). Its clear that a Republican led congress is not going to challenge Trump, but will actually shield him from investigations. Only hope is Democrats win the house or senate in 2026 and can start launching investigations into his clear corruption while in office.

Im curious if the DOJ could be sued for dereliction of duty for simply ignoring clear exercises of bribery and corruption.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

All Stars look away

 

[Arithmetic]

It’s no secret by now, but Trump and his family are able to use the memecoin to take foreign money. There are several ways they can do this.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

This is kind of upsetting.

 

[Wargames]

In 2026 if the democrats get either or both chambers expect them to drag this up and the trumps to deny it, and then at most maybe it get confiscated though I think the better odds are nothing happens.

 

[ucanthandlethetruth]

In 2026 if the democrats get either or both chambers expect them to drag this up and the trumps to deny it, and then at most maybe it get confiscated though I think the better odds are nothing happens.

In 2026 and 2027 if these traitorous people in government don't start going to jail facing swift justice for long periods of time none of this matters. We have actually lost count of the corruption and they not even hiding it now because there has been zero repurcussion for anyone.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/15/ai-uae-openai-trump-trip/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzQ3MjgxNjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzQ4NjYzOTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NDcyODE2MDAsImp0aSI6ImQ0YWE1ODhlLTAxYzUtNDM0Yi1hNDAwLTA2MGU2MjY2MDA5NCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjUvMDUvMTUvYWktdWFlLW9wZW5haS10cnVtcC10cmlwLyJ9.GOyrawuOTHH0GODMK7CJZRP9ZOvI0xfqR-0Aazmhvw4

With Trump’s trip, the gulf states take center stage in the AI boom -…
Summarize
Elizabeth Dwoskin

President Donald Trump is greeted by girls at an official arrival ceremony Thursday in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Amid a flurry of dealmaking and fanfare on President Donald Trump’s Middle East trip this week, one theme was clear: The Persian Gulf states have cemented their role as key players in the artificial intelligence boom.

For all the talk of preventing China’s authoritarian government from dominating the AI industry, the deals put a different set of authoritarian countries squarely at the forefront of AI. The emirs and sheikhs of the gulf will be accessing, building and, most importantly, funding the technology in the coming years, side by side with U.S. companies.

The trend was well underway before Trump’s trip, but the president, hopping around the region with a coterie of tech billionaires, has accelerated and highlighted the shift.

More than 25,000 people and 3,050 companies attended the Web Summit in Doha, Qatar, in February, the largest technology conference in the Middle East. (Noushad Thekkayil/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
On Thursday, OpenAI was in intense negotiations with two national champions in the United Arab Emirates, G42 and MGX, over a megadeal that would enable the San Francisco-based company to build data centers and develop its technology in the country, said three people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe nonpublic developments. In turn, OpenAI would receive new investments that would enable it to build U.S. data centers with a consortium of partners.

OpenAI declined to comment. The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.

Follow Trump’s second term

AI chip developer Nvidia is set to sell hundreds of thousands of its most advanced chips to the UAE, The Post reported this week. Those sales would have been severely limited under rules former president Joe Biden had put in place, which the Trump administration scrapped last week just days before they were meant to go into effect.
Those UAE deals would come on top of billions of dollars’ worth of agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar that were showcased in recent days, involving semiconductor chip sales, mining for rare minerals, and data centers with major U.S. firms. Some of the deals appeared to predate Trump’s second term, and to include rough estimates for how much contracts could generate in the future.

The White House on Thursday took credit for an additional $200 billion in commercial deals between U.S. and UAE firms. It said it had reached new agreements for the UAE to invest in “U.S. data centers that are at least as large and as powerful as those in the UAE,” and to commit to stronger protections against the diversion of U.S. technology.


Business leaders, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, front, attended a Saudi-U.S. business investment forum Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A who’s who of the tech industry, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, joined Trump in Saudi Arabia this week. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) It’s a shift from just a few years ago, when top tech executives did not attend the kingdom’s flagship tech expo as activists criticized the regime for human rights violations and the killing of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
In a speech in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Tuesday, Trump said new gulf leaders are “forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism.”

But the reality is far more complicated. Some foreign policy experts have expressed concerns that the United States is offshoring a core strategic technology, selling it to the highest bidder and potentially undermining U.S. dominance.

“Deals on the scale being contemplated could be enough for the UAE to build some of the world’s biggest supercomputers,” said Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who focuses on AI tech. The trip “marks the emergence of the gulf as one of the biggest players in the AI race. I hope the Trump administration thought about whether this is an outcome they wanted to encourage, and I hope they got real concessions — and not illusory promises of security — in return.”

In the run-up to the Trump trip, the White House had discussions with UAE officials about building guardrails to prevent the technology from getting diverted to China or other U.S. adversaries, according to an administration official involved in the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private discussions. UAE officials agreed to keep the computing power in the country and only allow remote access to approved customers, and to set up audit trails.

The Trump administration’s view, the person said, is that the region aspires to be an AI powerhouse and that if the U.S. does not find a path for the countries to access American technology, Chinese hardware will become dominant there.

G42 received 100,000 graphic processing units, or GPUs, and another 400,000 will go to U.S. companies operating in the region, the person said. The United States, by contrast, has millions of GPUs, and the investment from the UAE in U.S. data center infrastructure will enable American companies to advance at a far greater pace. The person added that in this arrangement there was little risk of the Middle East surpassing the U.S. in AI.

U.S. tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Altman, have spent the past several years angling for financing and partnership in the region. They’ve had to look well beyond Silicon Valley to raise cash because of the costly and energy-intensive nature of producing AI. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, Musk’s xAI and others have plans to scale up the computing power in their data centers, buying hundreds of thousands of chips.

Elon Musk laughs with Trump as Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and his spouse, Sheikha Jawaher, greet a guest at a state dinner in Doha on Wednesday. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Artificial intelligence is considered a core strategic technology for national security, particularly because of its use in a new generation of autonomous weaponry or practices such as nuclear modeling. For that reason, U.S. tech leaders have sought the imprimatur of the government before engaging in dealmaking in the Middle East.

The Biden administration, keenly aware that deepening ties between China and the Middle East threatened U.S. tech dominance, encouraged Silicon Valley firms to cut deals in the region, in particular with the UAE. But its officials eyed Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both countries with spotty track records on human rights issues, more cautiously.

The Biden administration had proposed allowing chip sales there, but on a staged timeline, with certain caps and guardrails. For example, local companies that met stringent security standards would be able to purchase chips that were estimated to be about 12 months behind the most advanced models, enabling the U.S. to maintain an edge. And trusted U.S. companies could have installed up to 7 percent of their computing base in each gulf country.


Then-President Joe Biden meets with UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in the Oval Office in September. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
The restrictions were put in place to maintain U.S. dominance and to prevent some of the technology from being reexported to China, as well as to protect against AI being used for surveillance of populations, cracking down on dissidents or other undemocratic purposes.

The tenor of the events in the Middle East this week, and the flood of announcements and the lifting of caps, demonstrates that the vibe has shifted, from a more hesitant integration with gulf countries to a full-throated embrace of their role as financiers and partners in the AI revolution.

This week’s dealmaking in the gulf, blessed by the Trump administration, was the strongest demonstration yet of an argument that the American AI industry has embraced with heightened urgency in recent months: that a no-holds-barred approach to regulation is the only possible course to stop China from becoming the world’s dominant AI power.

In public statements and congressional testimony, AI executives have framed their mission to develop supersmart artificial intelligence as existential for democracy. If American politicians regulate the tech too strictly, the AI industry has argued, China’s authoritarian government may dominate the tech, boosting its geopolitical power.


OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Riyadh on Tuesday during his visit with Trump. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Altman in particular has repeated the need for “democratic AI,” including by writing in an opinion piece in The Post in 2024 that “a democratic vision for artificial intelligence must prevail over an authoritarian one.”