The U.S. is close to striking a deal to export 500,000 of Nvidia's (NVDA, Financial) advanced AI chips annually to the United Arab Emirates, according to a Thursday Reuters report.
The agreement, set to run through 2027 with an option to extend to 2030, allocates 20% of the chips roughly 100,000 units. to UAE-based AI firm G42. The remaining chips would be shared among U.S. companies with substantial AI operations, including Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) and Oracle (ORCL, Financial), which may also consider building data centers in the Emirates.
Under the deal's terms, G42 must match each UAE facility with a similar data center in the U.S., promoting domestic infrastructure alongside overseas deployments. A separate working group will define what qualifies as an “advanced AI chip” and establish security requirements.
These chips likely encompass Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, or potentially its upcoming Rubin series surpassing the previous Hopper generation in performance. Bloomberg News reported that over the deal's lifetime, G42 could secure computing capacity equivalent to 1 million to 1.5 million of Nvidia's H100 chips, roughly four times the allowance under the Biden-era AI diffusion export rule that the administration plans to rescind.
Discussions are ongoing and the deal could evolve before finalization, Reuters added.
