Nvidia, ADM Buoyed by Saudi AI Deals, Softer US Export Controls

With deals in the Middle Kingdom on hold, US semiconductor firms have a new geographic hotspot: the Middle East.

Santa Clara-based chip companies Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced this week that they inked deals with a newly launched Saudi AI venture. They form a fraction of a $600 billion pledge by Saudi Arabia to invest in the US that President Trump unveiled Tuesday, and behind the announcements is a regulatory shift analysts say is poised to reshape the global AI economy and the geopolitics surrounding it for years to come.

Oh, the Humainity

While the US and China may have struck a temporary truce in a trade war over most goods, semiconductors are a different story. The Trump administration recently toughened export rules to bar American-made AI processors from being sold to China (the Middle Kingdom) and Nvidia disclosed last month that it would take a $5.5 billion writedown because of restrictions on high-end chips.

But with one market walled off, a whole host of them opened up on Tuesday. The Commerce Department rescinded Biden-era export controls on dozens of other foreign countries that would have introduced tiered access to US chips as of yesterday. That will allow more semiconductors to be exported without federal approval, including to Gulf nations where the previous administration was concerned that China, seeking a technological edge, could secure them through go-betweens.

Enter Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is launching its very own AI company focused on seemingly everything under the sun in the sector: “data centers, AI infrastructure and cloud capabilities, and advanced AI models and solutions.” In what was surely no coincidence, Humain, as the Saudi venture will be called, had massive deals lined up with Nvidia and AMD right in time for Trump’s trip to Riyadh on Tuesday:

• Nvidia will sell 18,000 of its advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell chips to Humain for a start, with “several hundred thousand” high-tech processors to follow in the next five years. The company’s shares rose 4.2% Wednesday as markets digested the news — and the Trump administration is also considering letting Nvidia sell a million advanced chips to the UAE.
• Rival AMD struck its own $10 billion deal with Humain to provide software and chips for data centers “stretching from the United States to Saudi Arabia,” sending its shares up 4.6% Wednesday. BofA Securities analyst Vivek Arya wrote in an investor note that the combined AI projects could generate $3 billion to $5 billion in annual chip sales, and in the process “offset headwinds from restrictions on US companies shipping to China.”

Keep ‘Em Coming: Humain also struck a $5 billion partnership with Amazon Web Services to build an “AI Zone” in the kingdom a little over a year after AWS said it would invest $5.3 billion to bring data centers and other infrastructure to the country. And, in keeping with the week’s theme, the deals kept coming on Wednesday: Majority state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco said it signed 34 deals with US companies worth up to $90 billion, including a pact with Nvidia to build AI factories and digital-transformation deals with tech firms Amazon and Qualcomm and more traditional energy agreements with Exxon Mobil, SLB, Halliburton and Baker Hughes.