US close to letting UAE import millions of Nvidia’s AI chips

The US has a preliminary agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to allow it to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips per year, starting in 2025, two sources familiar with the situation said, boosting the Emirates’ construction of data centers vital to developing artificial intelligence models.

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The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agreement was at least through 2027, but that there was a chance it could be in place until 2030.

The draft deal called for 20% of the chips, or 100,000 of them per year, to go to UAE's tech firm G42, while the rest would be split among US companies with massive AI operations like Microsoft and Oracle that might also seek to build datacenters in the UAE, the sources said.

They said the agreement is still being negotiated and could change before being finalized. One source said the deal, elements of which were first reported by the New York Times, faced growing opposition in the US government over the past day.