The United States has approved the sale of tens of thousands of advanced AI semiconductors to the UAE AI company G42 and the Saudi Arabian (referred to as Saudi Arabia) AI startup Humain. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the two compani...
The United States has approved the sale of tens of thousands of advanced AI semiconductors to the UAE AI company G42 and the Saudi Arabian (referred to as Saudi Arabia) AI startup Humain.
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the two companies are each authorized to obtain 35,000 NVIDIA GB300 or equivalent AI chips. The deal is conditional on both companies complying with strict security and reporting requirements. According to people familiar with the matter, the United States and the two countries are negotiating on risks related to China, and the agreement includes provisions such as preventing the flow of sensitive technology to foreign hostile forces.
Previously, the UAE G42 had promised to cut business with Huawei and further reached a US$1.5 billion cooperation with Microsoft; Saudi Arabia’s Humain also publicly promised not to purchase Huawei equipment. It is unclear what security conditions the U.S. imposed on the export licenses for the two companies.
The UAE committed to investing US$1.4 trillion in the United States earlier this year and has also maintained close relations with the Trump administration; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also visited Washington this week with the goal of deepening bilateral economic relations. However, some officials in the Trump administration still express concerns that these high-performance computing devices or AI systems may benefit the Chinese military.
The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security recently approved Microsoft, Oracle and other U.S. companies to use these key semiconductors in the UAE project. However, previous export licenses did not cover local UAE companies such as G42.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said in early November that very strict conditions would have to be met to gain approval. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42 last year and has Brad Smith serving on the company's board of directors. At that time, the G42 also promised U.S. lawmakers that it would stop purchasing Chinese equipment and withdraw from business related to Chinese companies.
G42 is also investing heavily in data centers and cloud computing, hoping to gain infrastructure opportunities for AI model training and operation in the AI wave.
US Approves Sale of 35,000 AI Chips to UAE’s G42, Saudis’ Humain Further reading: AMD, Cisco, and Humain plan to build an AI joint venture and have won their first major customer Big impact! NVIDIA AI servers are rumored to be considering switching to LPDDR, and memory supply will continue to tighten next year
