Return to the source? Trump makes AI deals with the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia

Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson, Outsourcer in Chief: Is Trump Trading Away America’s Tech Future?, NYTimes, May 16, 2025.

Over the course of a three-day trip to the Middle East, President Trump and his emissaries from Silicon Valley have transformed the Persian Gulf from an artificial-intelligence neophyte into an A.I. power broker.

They have reached an enormous deal with the United Arab Emirates to deliver hundreds of thousands of today’s most advanced chips from Nvidia annually to build one of the world’s largest data center hubs, three people familiar with the talks said. The shipments would begin this year, with the vast majority of the chips going to U.S. cloud service providers and about 100,000 of them to G42, an Emirati A.I. firm.

The administration revealed the agreement on Thursday in an announcement unveiling a new A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi supported by 5 gigawatts of electrical power. It would be the largest such project outside the United States and help U.S. companies serve customers in Africa, Europe and Asia, the administration said. The details about the chips weren’t disclosed, and it’s not clear if they could still be subject to change.

As Mr. Trump traversed the region in recent days, the United States also struck multibillion-dollar agreements to sell advanced chips from Nvidia and AMD to Saudi Arabia. The United States and Saudi Arabia are also still in discussions on a larger contract for A.I. technology, five people familiar with the negotiations said.

There's more at the link.

And remember, mathematics from the Far East made its way to Europe via the Arab world:

The algorithms of arithmetic were collected by Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizm around 825 AD in his treatise Kitab al jabr w'al-muqabala (Penrose 1989). They received an effective European exposition in Leonardo Fibonacci's 1202 work, Algebra et almuchabala (Ball 1908). It is easy enough to see that algorithms were important in the eventual emergence of science, with all the calculations so required. But they are important on another score. For algorithms are the first purely informatic procedures which had been fully codified. Writing focused attention on language, but it never fully revealed the processes of language (we’re still working on that). A thinker contemplating an algorithm can see the complete computational process, fully revealed.

The word “algorithm” is derived from the name “al-Khowarizm” and “algebra” from “al jabr.”