US President Donald Trump has brokered a deal that will see the creation of the largest AI campus outside of the United States to be established in the United Arab Emirates. 
The announcement was made during Trump’s whistle-stop tour of the Middle East, where he visited Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
There have been a number of blockbuster deals made in all three countries, with $200bn worth of deals being made in the UAE alone.
AI is the central theme and consistent pattern in all of the deals, and the announcement of the AI Campus in Abu Dhabi is being viewed as seismic, due to the fact that it will be the largest AI Campus outside of the United States.
In addition to this, the agreement also gives the UAE greater access to advanced AI chips, which only serves to curb the influence of Chinese companies.
The US and the UAE did not say which AI chips could be included in the datacenters, but it has been reported by some media agencies such as Reuters that the UAE could be allowed to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips each year starting later this year.
The agreement is a major win for the UAE, which has been trying to balance its relations with its long-time ally the US and its largest trading partner, China.
A key component in the agreement announced on Thursday is the 10sq mile (25.9 sq km) AI campus in Abu Dhabi with 5GW of power capacity for AI datacentres.
The campus will be built by Abu Dhabi state-backed firm G42, but the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said in a release that “American companies will operate the datacentres and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region”.
The US fact sheets also described chip company Qualcomm working on an AI-related engineering centre and that Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit of the tech and commerce company, would work with local partners on cybersecurity and fostering cloud adoption.