White House Touts $270 Billion Worth of Deals at Saudi-palooza

Maybe $1 trillion has become the new $1 billion, but even the wealthiest country in the world isn’t scoffing at checks with just nine zeroes. 

A day after the White House proclaimed that Saudi Arabia boosted its spring pledge to invest $600 million in the US to a tidy $1 trillion during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington, DC, President Donald Trump said companies from both nations inked $270 billion in deals at a US-Saudi business forum.

Deals and Details

The details remain fuzzy. No timeline was given for Saudi Arabia’s $1 trillion in investments and, while the US-Saudi Investment Forum on Wednesday drew corporate royalty from Chevron, Tesla, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Cisco, General Dynamics, Pfizer and more, it wasn’t immediately clear which companies inked deals. Trump did say GE Aerospace will “deliver dozens of new engines” while a handful of other pacts, while short on financial details, highlighted some international bargaining.

The day before Wednesday’s forum, Trump said he would approve plans by Saudi Arabia to buy dozens of F-35s, a deal that Jefferies analysts estimate will net defense contractor Lockheed Martin roughly $4 billion in sales. That coincided with a strategic defense pact, with Saudi Arabia being designated a “major non-NATO ally.” Despite human rights controversies including the 2018 assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia has remained strategically important to US Middle East policy and a key source of oil. Among the crown prince’s strategic goals, however, is rapidly diversifying his country’s economy beyond the energy sector by 2030:

• MP Materials, the US rare earths miner in which the Defense Department became the biggest shareholder earlier this year, agreed with state-owned Saudi mining company Maaden to build a rare earths refinery in the Kingdom. MP and the Pentagon will have a 49% stake in the project.
• The news drove MP Materials’ shares 8% higher, to $63, on Wednesday. Even before the deal was announced, Goldman Sachs analysts had set a price target of $77, implying there’s still plenty of upside. If all works out, the US gets a pipeline that helps curb its reliance on China, which has a near-monopoly on global rare earths refining, and Saudi Arabia strengthens its mining industry.

Because It’s 2025: It wouldn’t be the current year without some artificial intelligence deals, would it? Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems and Saudi AI startup Humain said Wednesday they will form a joint venture to build data centers in the Middle East, starting with a 100-megawatt project in the Kingdom. Elon Musk’s xAI will also team with Humain to build a major new data center in Saudi Arabia. While details of those deals weren’t disclosed either, Grok may be able to help fill in some of the blanks.